


runaway scars

by evanescent_jasmine



Series: when the sunlight dies [2]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Hill Top Road Weirdness, Dimension-Hopping, Gen, Reference to Injury, Self-Loathing, Time Travel, reference to past character death, they will be a found family if it kills me
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-14
Updated: 2020-12-04
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:20:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 27,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24724429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evanescent_jasmine/pseuds/evanescent_jasmine
Summary: Apparently, this Martin is from another dimension. Apparently, the world is full of eldritch horrors, one of which is their boss, and he’s here to help. Becauseapparently, Jon is, or will be, a monster who ends the world.Jon doesn’t know what to do with that information.Sasha thinks she does.Naturally, neither of them thinks to share this.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood & Sasha James & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist & Tim Stoker, OG Archival Team, Queerplatonic Sasha James & Tim Stoker
Series: when the sunlight dies [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1719928
Comments: 108
Kudos: 229





	1. Chapter 1

Having already suffered through _one_ sleepless night in silence, Sasha decides to give up the pretense and flop onto her back with a quiet huff. She reaches for her phone and squints against the glow, one eye closed, just long enough to read _3:12 AM_. She makes a disgusted noise, then rolls her head to look over at Tim, the tense outline of his shoulders. Then the phone’s glow fades and she can’t see even that.

“You don’t fool me, Stoker,” she grumbles, setting the phone back down on the bedside. “I know you’re awake.”

“Well, I am _now_.”

“Oh, come off it. Last time I was here, your upstairs neighbour was drilling at eight and you didn’t even notice. Takes more than me moving to wake you up. Besides, you weren’t snoring.”

“I do not snore, first of all. And second, maybe I was still drifting off and you so cruelly tore me out of it.”

“Come onnnn. I’m your guest, aren’t I? Your job to entertain me and such—please don’t turn that into innuendo.”

That gets a laugh out of him, quiet as it is, and he finally turns over, mattress creaking, to face her. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

“Liar.”

“No, seriously. Didn’t occur to me. I _do_ have some depth, you know.”

“So you say.”

And silence, again.

There’s been a lot of that since Prentiss. The first day of it had been good, she’d needed it that first day. They’d been up since they found the tapes the day before and the hours just bled into each other, and then Martin was back, and there were worms, and once the adrenaline wore off they’d all crashed hard. She’d slept for an age.

And then it had been going through to see which tapes they’d salvaged, coordinating them picking up some things from their respective flats, helping Martin change the dressing on his leg, and the silence was concentration, things that needed to be done.

Today, now, the silence is grating. Too many things unsaid and all of them buzzing around. Sasha’s no more sure of how to say them than she was before, but it’s three in the morning so she can blame this on insomnia taking away her filter or something.

She wakes her phone again and, with both the light and her eyes on him, Tim manages a weak smile despite squinting against the glow.

“I’m here, Sash.”

“So, which is it? Guilt about Martin or wondering about the Eric Delano tape?”

The smile turns into a grimace. “That’s your idea of entertaining you?”

“Yep.” Even pops her p.

“Very Beholding.”

“...Shit, it is, isn’t it?”

And she gets a popped p, “Yep,” right back.

“Yeah, guess I deserve that…Although we’re _all_ Beholding, apparently, so I bet you’ll follow in my footsteps soon enough.” After a beat, though, Sasha adds, “You know I’m joking, right? You don’t have to tell me. Just...it’s not helping? Bottling it up? I can see you beating yourself up about it, and Jon’s not panicking as quietly as he thinks he is, and it’s not like _I’m_ not freaking out about this too. So it feels a bit silly that we’re all in the same boat, panicking about the same thing, and not talking about it.”

“When you put it like that, it does sound pretty silly, yeah.”

“...So…?”

Tim takes a long time in answering. She can hear him tracing a finger over the covers, sometimes plucking at them, can imagine the restless motion of his hands without needing to see it. But she won’t push him any more than she already has.

“How did it feel? When you were...the whole... going after Martin?”

“What do you mean?”

He makes a frustrated noise. “Like, was it—was it just a feeling? Did you just _know_ —like, if I’d unlocked a high enough level with our spooky eyeball overlord or whatever, would I have…”

“Known? I’m...I dunno, Tim. It felt like...like normal? I guess? I just...noticed some things were off. Maybe it’s just that you didn’t end up in the same situations?”

“We had lunch together _every day_ , Sash.”

“Yeah, true.”

If he doesn’t want to be comforted, she isn’t about to comfort him. She waits until Tim is done stewing and continues by himself, even quieter now, saying, “I didn’t notice there, either. In the other dimension or whatever. The—When you…”

“Not-Sasha?”

“Yeah.”

“That _was_ supernatural, though, Tim. It literally...wrote me out of existence. That smug wanker Elias was very clear about that.”

And _that_ certainly stung. Martin hadn’t quite been willing to go into the details but it wasn’t necessary, not when they have those statements about the table as it is. Just...ate her life and took it over, and no one to notice. Not so unforgettable now. Being first to die in _this_ group feels like a horrible sort of achievement. Having her life stolen by the precise sort of doppelganger she’d briefly suspected Martin of being...well, that’s just ironic, isn’t it?

“ _Jon_ found out, though,” Tim says.

“Pretty sure that _was_ spooky eyeball powers.”

“Just—I didn’t notice then, I didn’t notice now, how do I know I can trust myself? That it won’t happen again or—the table is still _there_.”

“I know.”

“And the circus, and the—fuck, maybe even more holes into another dimension where even more Martins and Jons and…” She can feel the mattress shifting underneath her as Tim turns over, hears his voice muffled behind, presumably, his hands, as he says, “God, I’m being such a twat. We’re all in this and you’re the one whose life got overwritten and _I’m_ angsting about it.”

“Eh... Just a little bit.”

Sasha leans over him to turn on the light on his bedside and then settles on her side again, propped up on her elbow to look down at him. Tim sighs, rubbing his hand down his face once and finally lowers them. The bedside light makes him look sallow.

“Sorry. I’m...Are _you_ alright?”

“We’re all definitely not alright, Tim.”

“Yeah...yeah.”

“It’s okay that you’re...Y’know. It’s a lot to take in. You can be not alright...Are you worried I’m not me? Right now? I mean, I should hope not. I definitely hope you didn’t let me sleep in your bed thinking I’m an impostor.”

She means it as a joke, for the most part, but Tim’s face immediately creases into disgust and she knows she’s made a horrible mistake.

“You don’t think I—other Tim, I mean, and that - that Not-Sasha? Oh, God, of course he would have. Fuck.”

“Hey, hey, you don’t know that. You don’t know Other Tim and Other Sasha were like us at all in the first place. Come on, Stoker. Twat, remember? Try not to spiral. Stay with me, here.”

“Ugh, yeah, okay. Trying, trying.”

It’s admittedly a little endearing, how he scrunches his whole face up like that. Even if the context is...less so.

“How about I make us some tea?” Sasha says.

“No, no. I’m the host or whatever. I’ll do it.” And he promptly gets up, turning to swing his legs over the side. Even if she’d have protested, he clearly needs to be doing something. As he feels for his slippers, Tim adds, “Besides, I don’t want possible doppelgangers snooping around my tea cabinet, taking the good stuff.”

“Great idea,” she says, and grins. “Just leave me in your bedroom instead.”

“Oh, I got nothing to hide here, love. _You’re_ the one who won’t like what you find.”

“Ew, Tim.”

“See?”

And he’s almost smiling as he shuffles out. Good enough for now. He has a point, though, and Sasha makes a mental note to start figuring out a way to verify and keep record of their identities, going forward.

Actually. Tapes might not be a bad idea.

*

The doppelganger of Martin Blackwood is singing in the shower, badly and with great abandon. Jon can hear him from the kitchen, even over the sound of Jon’s vigorous scouring of that one stubborn grease stain at the bottom of Tim’s oven. He doesn’t know the song or the lyrics—which isn’t surprising, really, he’s woefully behind on most pop culture—but neither does Martin, apparently, as he ends up humming through parts or replacing them with what are clearly nonsense words before he gets into belting the chorus again.

He wonders idly if Other Martin sang any better, and immediately grimaces at himself, guilt making his stomach swoop.

There is no reason for Jon to have known a lot about Other Martin. Just stepping into Tim’s flat for the first time had revealed a great deal he hadn’t known about Tim, and he liked to think he and Tim were...friendly, if not friends. Certainly they’d known each other a long time, if nothing else. Jon had not known Martin for a long time before...well. Other Martin had been Jon’s subordinate, and that was all, and…

 _Other_.

That’s wrong, isn’t it? The man currently singing in the shower is from a literal other dimension. Jon shouldn’t be thinking of _him_ without qualifiers, and calling the Martin who had died...Other.

But that’s absurd too, because Jon has actual legitimate reasons to feel guilty, and here he is fixating on this nonsense based on nothing more than his mental dialogue and—

Frowning, he tightens his fingers around the wire wool and gets back to scrubbing. He will think of nothing except the dismal state of this stove, which Tim must have never cleaned in his life.

If anything, he should feel bad about immediately leaping to criticism. He should feel bad for a whole host of things, including but not limited to:

  * Not noticing Martin had been replaced by his doppelganger from an alternate dimension.
  * Defending said doppelganger from Sasha, who _had_ noticed.
  * Not having liked him until his doppelganger came along and they sometimes shared a very late dinner at the Archives because Jon had _thought_ he was being decent and making up for things but...apparently not.
  * Allowing said dislike to spill into his personal and professional interactions
  * Which in turn prompted Oth— _Original_ Martin to do his own investigations into the Vittery statement to prove Jon wrong.



At least that was what the Martin who had given him the statement had said. Who knows how Original Martin felt. Perhaps he’d been afraid of losing his job. Perhaps he’d been curious. The fact remains that if Jon hadn’t been—well, _like that_ , Original Martin might have felt more comfortable coming to him with his concerns and plans to follow up on the Vittery case.

And...if Jon hadn’t been _like that_ maybe there would have been no need to follow up at all. He’d known it was real, hadn’t he? Felt it somewhere deep under his skin, under his bones, under his self. It’s the same place he feels the phantom of that slim cardboard book, the same place he sinks under with every _statement begins._

“Jon?”

Jon bangs his head on the broiler and, hissing, slowly leans out of the oven again. He rubs the back of his head, only to remember a moment later his hands are covered in oven cleaner and grease and, ugh, grimaces in earnest.

Which prompts Martin to step forward, concern on his face, apologies everywhere. Jon shakes his head.

“No, no, it’s fine, I’m alright. Just...startled me.”

He hadn’t heard the singing stop, the water turn off, the door opening, footsteps, anything. Any other time, any other _person_ , and Jon might have attributed it to his own tendency to get lost in thought, but given what Martin had told them...

“Sorry,” Martin says again, and stays where he is. He doesn’t _look_ any less solid, at least, not blurred around the edges. He looks tired, a bit drawn, a bit gray, but Jon has seen how fitful Martin’s sleep is so, nothing necessarily strange or supernatural about it. His hair is curling from the damp, which could serve either theory, but his skin has that hot-water-flush to it so that’s another point against the Lonely explanation. Just Jon zoning out, then.

Martin gestures to the kettle. “I was...going to make a cup of tea? Would you like some?”

“Oh. Ah. No, I’m fine, thank you. I’d rather get this cleaned before Tim and Sasha come back.”

“Oh? When I woke up and everyone was out, I figured you’d changed your mind and gone out with them after all.”

It’s only when the, “No, I went out by myself,” is already out of his mouth that Jon cringes, remembers, ah, fuck, shouldn’t have said that. He decides he’ll ignore it and maybe Martin will too, but then the silence stretches, thick and waiting, and he can practically _feel_ the disapproving frown and the urge to see if he’s right makes him glance over from the corner of his eye.

He isn’t right.

It’s a wonder he ever mistook Original Martin for this one, or maybe it’s merely that this Martin just isn’t pretending anymore. He stands with his shoulders squared, arms folded, and the frown he levels at Jon is not disapproval, but pressed-thin, unsurprised disappointment. He raises an eyebrow and, voice carefully even, says, “I thought we agreed none of us were going out alone.”

“Well, I…” No. No, Jon rallies himself, settles on his heels and rolls back his own shoulders, because he can face this. He didn’t do anything wrong. “Tim didn’t have the supplies I needed, and it didn’t seem worth waking you over. It’s not as though I went far; it was just the shop around the corner, and Elias will hardly be lying in wait in the crisp aisle.”

“Not Elias, no.”

“I was out for five minutes at most. In a well-lit, reasonably crowded public space. I wasn’t going to get kidnapped at the shops.”

“My Jon got kidnapped three times in one year so, y’know, I’m not too sure about that.

“Well, _I’m_ not—” Jon bites down on the rest, because that brittle set to Martin’s jaw, the way his shoulders inch up ever so slightly, they tell him this is a sore spot and… This might not be the Original Martin Blackwood but Jon’s done enough already.

Both versions of him, apparently.

Jon swallows. “I’ll be more careful in the future.”

*

He does finish cleaning the stove before Tim and Sasha get back, but not the kitchen as a whole, and gets hip-checked outside. Tim had apparently not realised that Jon had been entirely serious when he’d asked if it was alright that he cleaned and is halfway between bemused and exasperated, all with that undercurrent of...something, that jittery hardness that had been there ever since he came back from the assignment Jon sent him on and found them listening to the tapes.

“Wow, I knew I wouldn’t be up to standard, Boss, but you’re really showing us up here,” he says, crowding Jon into the living room.

And since Jon can’t tell if _that_ is a joke, he decides it’s a better idea to treat it seriously and says, “It isn’t about standards. Mind, the oven _did_ need a fair bit of, um…” No, that isn’t the way to start it. “ _My_ kitchen is hardly the height of cleanliness, although really it’s because I haven’t—well, anyway, what I mean to say is I wanted to—”

“It’s fine, Jon.”

It’s tempting to just take that offered exit and move on, but if they start this with misunderstandings it will be a very tense few weeks, and they have worse things to worry about right now than kitchen cleaning and pride and how difficult words are.

Deep breaths.

“I - It was...my suggestion to more or less take over your flat, and cleaning is the least I can do. It’s...If the kitchen had been spotless, I’d have found something else to clean. Or I’d have cooked. Which isn’t to say your cooking isn’t perfectly fine, only that I—”

“Need something to do. Yeah, I get it.”

And Tim gives a small grin that Jon returns, tentative. Tim isn’t back to his usual self, quite. He feels off-balance, a little frayed, and his words have edges where Jon doesn’t remember any. Although apparently that usual self had been as real as Jon’s skeptic self, and just as effective.

Jon still doesn’t know entirely what the deal with the circus is. Martin had warned it might be better for Tim to write it down than to say it, and Tim hasn’t gotten around to it. But he doesn’t entirely need to.

  * His reaction to Martin saying Elias can watch them out of anything that has eyes, photographs included, and that Gertrude had apparently dealt with this by cutting the eyes out of everything.
  * How Tim handled the photographs that show him and someone who bears a remarkable resemblance to him. Tim had had a lot of photographs on display—friends, family, both here and in Singapore, it looks like—none tucked away as reverently as those.
  * Sasha’s warning glance from over Tim’s shoulder, protective, even when neither Jon nor Martin had been about to ask.



Tim’s flat is made of waiting empty spaces. Jon gets the sense it’s the circus’ fault, and that’s enough.

For now, at least. There are other priorities, like verifying the things Martin has been saying, finding what differences there may be between their worlds beyond this nonsense with the so-called Distortion and the time shifts, like saving the world from the apocalypse _he_ , apparently, starts.

(The “way out” had been soundly rejected by both Tim and Sasha, and Jon had recoiled bodily from the idea. But the idea is there, lurking, the visceral _what if_ whenever he sees something particularly sharp and pointy that paints the images of pain and blood and freedom behind his eyelids. If his nightmares weren’t already claimed by an eldritch horror, Jon imagines this would have taken over, and the strange twisting pang just under his chest is difficult to parse so he tries not to think about it.)

(He tries not to think about a lot of things.)

Sasha herds them into the living room to share their findings. Martin is the last to join them, limping his way to the couch. He waits at the edge of it, smile tentative and eyebrows raised in question, and Tim wordlessly scoots closer to Jon to let Martin sit beside him.

There had been plenty of space next to Jon and Jon had, in fact, been closer, so more convenient, especially considering his leg, but. Nevermind. People can sit where they like.

Jon scoots a little further, to the end of the couch, so Tim isn’t pressed against him.

“Right,” Sasha says, and claps her hands for attention. “So. Gertrude’s flat.”

In the photographs Tim spreads across the coffee table, Gertrude’s flat is sparse and Spartan, nothing at all like what Jon might have expected from the predecessor he had assumed was a doddering old grandmother.

“Didn’t take her for a hard scifi fan,” Tim says, as though that’s the most noteworthy thing about the photo of her books and not the eyes cut out of all of them.

More important is her laptop, which Sasha takes out of her bag now, although she says she doubts anything of use will be on it.

“If _I_ were a paranoid Head Archivist who kept my flat completely devoid of personality,” Sasha says. “I wouldn’t assume a laptop would be safe for that either. Still. Doesn’t hurt. If we’re lucky, she might not have deleted whatever was last on it.”

“Don’t suppose you have any, ah...insight?” Jon leans forward so he can look to Martin and gestures to the laptop. “What should we be looking for?”

The last word thrums under his tongue, too late to catch.

(He should apologise. Try to cut the words, contradict them. Anything. _Anything, Jonathan._ )

Eyes wide, he watches it sink into Martin as well and the immediate, “I don’t know,” that unspools from Martin tells him it worked. Jon didn’t _mean_ to use it but he did, and it worked, and that feels…

Martin blinks the compulsion off, or maybe, with the question answered, he’s no longer subject to it anyway. Whatever the case, Jon knows the next words are of Martin’s own free will. They aren’t as satisfying.

“Sorry, no...Jon was, um - My Jon, I mean. He was going through a bit of a rough time? Wasn’t really confiding in any of us and I didn’t get to hear his, uh...I think he called them Supplementals? Only the ones he sent through with me.”

And of those, all they have— _had_ , rather—was Jon running, scared for his life, from a thing that wore Sasha’s face and was threatening to wear his, having recklessly, _foolishly_ , destroyed the only thing binding it.

Jon takes some solace (and not a small amount of pride) in the fact he did not take Sasha’s advice to destroy it this time. It is, or should be, locked safely away where it can’t hurt anyone. Here, at least, he’s ahead of his doppelganger.

“But he didn’t tell me about Gertrude’s laptop as something to look out for, so…”

“So it must not have been significant in the grand scheme of things,” Sasha says.

Martin shrugs, apologetic. “Or he forgot? He may be sort of...a post-apocalyptic Google, but he can still forget stuff. And anyway, things are different here. It’s still worth a shot.”

“Could use a post-apocalyptic...uh, Google, was it? That was the search engine, right?” he says, and looks to Martin. At Martin’s nod, he continues, “Yeah, could definitely use a post-apocalyptic Google right now. Maybe without the apocalyptic bit. You sure you can’t do it, Bossman? Come on, give it a shot.”

“No, Tim, I’m...fairly sure I don’t have any mind-reading powers.”

“Won’t know if you don’t try.” Tim shifts in his seat to face Jon bodily, a knee on the couch, and holds his arms out with a _go ahead_ gesture. “Hit me with your best Jedi mind-tricks. What am I thinking about?”

“Star Wars, presumably.”

At Tim’s exaggerated gasp, Sasha rolls her eyes and says, “Leave off, Tim.”

“Hey, look, until Melanie King, Naomi Hearne, or Lionel Elliott get back to us, we gotta get a feel for what spooky powers we have in our arsenal.”

“Well...sorry to disappoint. No powers here.”

In the ensuing pause, Martin gently prompts Sasha to go on. Jon turns to listen to her, very intent on her findings with regard to Millbank prison. That makes it easier to pretend he doesn’t feel Martin’s gaze on him. Or the way the half-lie quivers in his throat.

*

He doesn’t mean to eavesdrop.

They’re cooking, Tim and Sasha. He and Martin had both already offered their help and been told, gently but firmly, that Martin should stay off of that leg, and Jon had already done enough and Tim needs to mess up his kitchen again, thanks.

After half an hour of Martin’s best smiling efforts to dispel the awkwardness and aimless channel surfing, none of which Jon paid attention to, Jon gets to his feet and decides he’s going to head to the kitchen and either make tea to pass the time or bully them into letting him help..

Hence the eavesdropping, Tim’s low rumbled, “Martin would have put up a fuss,” and Sasha’s soft, “Tim…” that makes Jon pause, a step forward turning into a step back.

Tim and Sasha are close, of course. They’re comfortable enough to share Tim’s room while they’re all here, and Jon has seen first-hand how protective Tim can get of her. He should backtrack. Give them their privacy.

He settles on his heels, thankful for the carpet muffling his socked feet. A hand on the wall, Jon leans in closer, tilting his head to listen.

“Martin hated being doted on. He would’ve been here already, trying to find something to do.”

“Maybe. I...think Martin would’ve given you space if you needed it too, though.” Every other word is accentuated by the thud of the knife against the wooden cutting board, slow and belaboured, because apparently Sasha can’t chop for toffee. “Or at least stayed out of the way if he thought he’d done something wrong. He’s trying to placate you.”

“Oh yeah, this’ll do it. We’ll be best friends in no time.”

“Not to mention the ridiculous amount of painkillers he’s on. For the worms? That I corkscrewed out of his leg? Remember them? Squishy, squelchy—”

“Sash, ugh, can you _not_ say that when we’re making pasta, please?”

“Oh, alright, alright. Thought you had a stronger stomach than that. My point is, this is actually the most in-character he’s been in ages, if you ask me.”

“I know. I know you believe him. Just...”

“You don’t? After all the tapes?”

“I believe the tapes. They feel par for the course at this point. And...I believe that he’s human, or close enough, And, yeah, I guess he did kill the worm lady and hasn’t killed _us_ in our sleep. That doesn’t mean he’s Martin, or that he didn’t—” There is the sound of a wooden spoon being set aside. Tim exhales slowly.

“Kill your Martin?”

Silence, except for whatever’s bubbling on the hob. Even Sasha stops her chopping. A step, a rustle of fabric.

“Look, I’m not saying you have to trust him. Only that—”

“Actually, Jon, I might have that tea after all, if that’s alright!”

That’s the second time today Martin has startled him out of his skin. Jon manages not to make a fool out of himself, at least, no smacking his head against anything or making undignified sounds. He does slide backwards a step before he calls back, “Yes, alright!” Like he hadn’t just been standing there at the door.

If Sasha and Tim see through it, they don’t say anything as he joins them. They’re at their separate stations, Tim over the pot and Sasha at the cutting board, and Jon gives an awkward slightly apologetic twitch of his mouth when Tim meets his eyes. Tim only makes fun of what he calls Jon’s obvious plot to take over his kitchen.

“This is because of the rice the other day, isn’t it?” Tim says, easy as anything, like he hadn’t just been speculating about having a murderer in the flat with them.

Jon can’t help his amused huff. “No, it’s not because of the rice.”

“Good. Because I’m never going to surrender. Who the hell salts their rice?”

Sasha groans, muttering, “Please don’t get started on the rice again.”

But Jon takes the obvious bait anyway. “We do? That is to say, North Africa and the Middle East, as does a great deal of South America as well, I’m told. In other words, much of the world.”

“Yeah, well, much of the world is wrong.”

“It’s not that it should be _salty_ , you just need enough for flavour and—”

“Nope! Wrong! Rice exists to be a blank template to support the _rest_ of the food.”

“Right.” Sasha takes Jon by the shoulders and steers him away from Tim and towards the counter. “If you two are going to bicker, I’m leaving _you_ with the veg-chopping duties, Jon. _I’m_ going to make that tea and relax on the couch, thank you very much.”

“Oh, no, I didn’t mean—”

“Too late.”

He feels a brief twinge of guilt at that but, given the look Sasha gives Tim, he’s sure they’ll continue the conversation later. He isn’t barging in on their shared activity and he didn’t interrupt their moment.

It occurs to him that maybe he should have felt bad for the eavesdropping too, but it’s hard to think of things like that when Tim is being aggressively opinionated and extroverted in his general direction.

That’s probably the point.

*

Sasha hands Martin his tea and settles pointedly beside him on the couch. His surprised smile is so Martin it hurts (at least, according to the photographs Tim unearthed while he was putting the others away) but the caution settles in a moment later as he draws himself straight, that polite distance he’s had since Sasha unmasked him.

Sotto voce, she says, “Thanks for the head’s up. Jon wasn’t making any noise, but didn’t seem to notice he was casting a shadow in the doorway.”

“Yeah, that’s Jon for you…”

“Mm. Always thinks he’s subtle, never is. I didn’t want Tim getting upset, though. He’s, ah...a bit touchy about how much he’s noticing things right now.”

Martin grimaces. “Right, yeah.”

“This isn’t me blaming you, mind. I’m not the biggest fan of being kept in the dark, no, but I also can’t confidently say what a better solution might have been.”

“Tha...anks? I...guess?” He glances down at his tea, then up at her. The fact he takes a sip despite clearly wondering if she did something with it says a lot. Just _what_ it says, she’s not sure yet, but whatever it is it’s a lot.

“No angles this time, no ulterior motives,” she says, and it’s only a _little_ bit of a lie. “You’re our best chance of surviving all this and you did save us from the worms. And...kept me from going into Artefact Storage and, y’know...Getting Not-Sasha’d. So I’m not about to antagonise you.”

“Technically, you saved _me_ from the worms. Like. Me specifically,” he says, and gestures down to his leg. “So, uh, call it even?”

“How is that, by the way?

“I mean...it hurts?”

“Yeah, fair.”

“Not infected, though, so I’m...yeah, I’m definitely counting that as a win.”

“Good. Going to put in a good word for us with your Jon, then?”

And his smile fades, and there’s that chill again, raising goosebumps up along her arms and back. Does he know he’s doing it? His stories had said that avatars can generally control what they do, but his Jon had spoken the apocalypse unwillingly—according to Martin, anyway, hardly an unbiased source—and Martin had apparently not realised when he disappeared for a full day into the Lonely before he reappeared to do his whole show and tell.

God, she still can’t quite take that name seriously. _The Lonely_. Doesn’t feel right for the fog that had ghosted over the Archives that night, or the way Martin just appeared from it.

“Don’t need to,” he says, cupping both hands around his tea. “It’s just Jon.”

Sasha can tell when she’s pushed far enough. She smiles, pulling her legs underneath her on the couch, and turns her gaze from him to the TV. “Right. What’re we watching?”

She’ll just have to try again later.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, that's right, I've claimed Jon for the Arabs. He belongs to us now. 
> 
> Seriously, though, thanks a ton for reading and I hope you enjoy part II of this nonsense fic! It's been kicking my ass these past few weeks (Sasha PoV? I was just as surprised as you are) so for part II I'll be posting on a biweekly schedule, so you can expect chapter two on **June 28th.**
> 
> So, so many thanks to abbyleaf101 and rustkid, who helped me make sense of the plot and the dumbass decisions these two will make. Any mistakes are mine.


	2. Chapter 2

The doppelganger of Martin Blackwood has bruxism. His jaw is clenched almost constantly and in his sleep, that graduates to grinding. 

Despite having already examined and blocked every nook and cranny in the room, despite knowing the source of the sound, the scrape-creak still pulls Jon from sinking into unconsciousness and leaves him in a heavy sluggish half-wakefulness. Just listening to the man sleeping at the other end of the room.

It reminds him of the statements with all the flesh, sometimes. Capital T, capital F, apparently, a proper fear all its own. _The Flesh._

Although, are teeth its domain? The tooth apple hadn’t been flesh, had it? Those students. That sounded more Stranger, capital S. 

If Jon is very generous to himself, he will think that is why he sometimes dreams of Dr. Elliott and the apple, smiling. He will pretend he doesn’t half-remember the edges of these dreams before the grinding sounds started to bleed into them, before Prentiss, even. He will pretend it makes sense as to why that dream melts into fog, into dark, into other terrors.

Tonight, he is not generous to himself, so to avoid thinking about that he passes the time trying to list the eldritch horrors that apparently plague the universe—multiverse?—according to a Victorian architect. It makes no sense for _all_ the world’s fears to be organised how an old white man saw it, mind, and he feels he should be against that just on principle. But the Fourteen are what Martin knows and what the apocalypse is made of, so the Fourteen are what he should know.

He always forgets at least two, often a different two each time. He always wonders what other classifications there might be, what flavours of apocalypse might be waiting around different corners.

He is too tired to be scared. 

(He is too scared not to lie.)

Tonight, it is his turn to sleep on the bed. Tim’s guest bed is not big enough for two, and Jon would not have been comfortable sharing even if it was, so they trade off that and the air mattress, because Martin is also absurdly stubborn and that was the only compromise they could reach. There’s Tim’s couch too, but it was too short for Martin to sleep on comfortably with his leg the way it is and, anyway, given...everything, Jon knows without it needing to be said that all of them would feel better about having someone to keep an eye on their dimension-hopping friend at all hours. 

And he’s the one who’s going to end the world, so it should be him, and maybe they feel better about having someone watching Jon as well.

Did the bruxism start before or after the world ended? 

Does sleep exist in the apocalypse?

Does sleep exist for him now?

It must, because the time changes when he squints blearily at his phone, but not in any way that coincides with actual rest. Is this the withdrawal Martin had told them about, or just the run-of-the-mill existential terror and preemptive guilt at the possibility he may be following in his own doppelganger’s footsteps? 

Hm.

It’s too early to get up, isn’t it?

Jon tilts his phone screen to cast some of the glow on the floor and, mm, no, doesn’t much fancy his chances of picking his way across without tripping on his own shoes or stepping on Martin. Despite this decision, he keeps watching Martin’s fuzzy outline until the phone goes dim.

There is something about the way he sleeps curled around that backpack. Even though they’ve already listened to everything that had been in there (at least, that Sasha had managed to salvage), which means there are no more secrets to hide, nothing to keep safe.

Well. No. That’s not quite true, is it?

Jon remembers—or remembers being told this, rather, as an anecdote from his Gran—how protective he was over his few photos of his parents. Let alone if he’d only had the one. 

He doesn’t _look_ like a monster, is the thing. The Jon who ended the world. 

Nevermind the scars, the shorn hair and beard more grey than black, the face drawn so, so thin. Aside from all of that…

He’d just looked like him, smiling at Martin. Lop-sided dimple and all.

Jon is privately glad that was one of the things that was salvaged, found at the bottom of the backpack under the tapes. Creased, but not ruined, Martin had carefully straightened it out before tucking it away while Jon pretended that he didn’t see, that he wasn’t intruding.

It’s on the tip of his tongue to ask, What was he to you? 

He can practically _taste_ the question and the little fizz of power he can now identify, like the first quick sip of Coke, freshly poured. A quiet burst of delight.

And isn’t that horrible, in and of itself. _Delight_. And isn’t it horrible that it’s not the delight that would stop him from asking. 

What would stop him, instead, is that he’d have to also ask, What’s the difference between us? Because it’s plain that Martin doesn’t see them as the same person. Which is good. Because they’re not. They may have the same face and the same voice and the same sodding dimple on only the right cheek, but they are not the same person. Jon doesn’t want to be. 

The question is _how_. Where’s the difference. 

Is it enough.

He squeezes his eyes shut against the image of Jane Prentiss coasting their way on a sea of worms, against the monstrous normal-looking Jonathan Sims and his scars and horrible powers rising above a sea of eyes.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow he’ll...figure out how to ask, _without_ the compulsion.

When he finally falls asleep, Jon dreams of a creeping, writhing fog and wakes up, barely any time later, with a start that wakes Martin too. 

“Yes, no, I’m fine,” he says to Martin’s sleep-soft concern, and tumbles out of the room for some caffeine. 

Better not to ask. Better not to sleep.

*

For the fourth night-sort-of-morning in a row, Sasha finds Jon already in the kitchen, half-hanging out of the window like a belligerent teenager trying to hide his new smoking habit as though the cigarette stink wasn’t already evident despite the scent of coffee. That’s normal, though. Or well, the coffee isn’t normal—she knows for a fact Jon has always found it distasteful if not in the form of a dessert—but it’s getting to be, and it’s understandable, given the difficulty they’ve all been having with sleep.

With...everything, really. 

They’re inching through their second week away from the Institute, six days longer than Elias’ authorised holiday, and that Archive hangover is such a bitch. Her head is already throbbing this morning, and she really hopes she won’t get a repeat of yesterday’s migraine. 

What _isn’t_ normal, what shouldn’t be normal, is the tinny sound coming from Jon’s earbuds, and that whirring tape. 

Again.

Sasha sighs but leaves him be, busying herself with brewing her own coffee until Jon notices her out of the corner of his eye and stops the tape himself, his head slightly bowed and gaze shifting away from her. That guilty puppy look shouldn’t be as effective as it is, but here they are. 

“This isn’t—it’s not one of the tapes Elias sent,” he says.

“I know.”

She pops some bread in the toaster, then gets up on tiptoe to peer into the cupboard. She pulls down the Marmite for herself, holds the ginger and rhubarb jam out for Jon’s approval, and sets that down as well when he nods. Not much for eating by himself, but she can generally convince him to have at least a slice of toast and jam with her. 

“I - I said I wasn’t going to listen to those, and I meant it.”

“Yep, you made that very clear.” 

His face, when they realised what that box contained, when he saw the handwriting of the letter addressed _Dear Archivist_ said plenty without his repeated assurances ever since.

Although maybe he _should_ listen to them, but they’ve had that argument already and it’s too early in the day to rehash it. Sasha leans against the counter with her coffee and faces him properly. 

He sighs, pulling the earbuds out. His other hand is curled protectively over the tape recorder nonetheless. “But you think I shouldn’t be listening to Martin’s tapes either.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“No, but you were going to.”

“Know that with your spooky eyeball powers, did you?”

“N - no, I—you just, the look on your face, and last time you said—”

“Jon. Relax. I was joking.”

“Oh.”

But he’s still drawn in on himself, shoulders tight against his body, and damn it, now she feels bad. 

“It’s not...I just think you shouldn’t punish yourself like this. _You_ haven’t done any of the mistakes on the tapes, _you_ know better now. And you have us.” Channelling her inner Tim, Sasha sets her coffee down decisively and strikes a superhero pose. “More importantly, you have me.”

And sure enough, that makes him laugh.

In the still-warm few seconds after, both of them just smiling even after she lets go of that absurd pose, Jon meets her eyes and says, “I’m sorry, you know...For - for everything.”

“You haven’t done anything wrong, Jon.”

“I invited you and Tim to the Archives. You wouldn’t be here if not for me. I took a job I - I knew I wasn’t qualified for—I mean I didn’t realise just _how_ much I wasn’t, but...It should have been you. Your promotion, I mean.”

“Which is it?”

“I’m...sorry?

“Are you sorry you dragged us to the Archives or saying we should have been there alone—because if I’d gotten that promotion, I’d have taken it, and you know I’d have asked for Tim.”

“I—no, I’m—” 

“Maybe I’d have asked for you to come join us too. Would it have been my fault then? No? Then stop apologising. Yes, maybe don’t accept jobs you’re not qualified for—God, Jon, that’s such a guy thing to do—but...you couldn’t have known. Stop beating yourself up for something you didn’t know.”

And, well, he has nothing to argue after that.

He stubs out his cigarette, she gets their toast ready, and they eat against the counter, idly talking over their plans for the day, who’s going where, which areas they’re combing over next to try and find an entrance to the tunnels from outside the Institute. Jon promises to shave first—he gets much fewer looks when he’s clean-shaven, apparently, something about a bearded Arab man loitering around a building makes people nervous, especially with how scraggly exhaustion makes him look—and waves off Sasha’s offer to be the one who goes with Tim to do the search.

“You, ah...You have your meeting with Ms. King today, as I recall. I doubt she’d take too kindly to seeing me, even if I’m _not_ haunting her.”

That catch in his voice at _if_...Sasha doesn’t comment, just hums her agreement. “Fair. I’d offer to come _with_ you and send Tim, but I somehow don’t think they’d get along.”

“You never know. He might be able to...win her over?” 

Jon glances at Sasha from over his glasses, eyebrows raised in a sort of _you know_ look.

“You mean seduce her? Melanie King?” Sasha leans back, amused, and lets him splutter and stutter himself into a state before taking pity and patting his hand, saying, “It’s alright, Jon, I know you’re not so mercenary as to require that from your employees…I’m just not sure Tim’s quite her _type._ ”

“And how would you—” Jon starts to say, waspish as he always gets when he feels foolish, and then he stops himself. Adjusts his glasses. “What—I mean...I wonder how you’d know.”

And she grins. “How do you think I got her number in the first place?”

*

Sasha exaggerated a bit, of course, mostly for the hilarious array of expressions that came across Jon’s face as he tried to figure out if she meant what he thought she meant, but it wasn’t too far from the truth. She might not have actively worked to seduce Ms. King, but Melanie _had_ given her her phone number, meaningful and deliberate, after their conversation during her first visit to the Institute. Sasha had even considered it for a bit. But when she texted Melanie, she’d made sure to clear up where she stood on dating, relationships, all that faff, even without the aroace bit, and they’d been fine with a bit of harmless flirtation ever since.

Which doesn’t stop Tim’s encouraging double thumbs up from the window as he and Jon pass in front of the cafe after they’ve dropped her off. Worse is that Melanie notices them _just_ as Sasha’s sitting down opposite her.

“Didn’t realise you were coming to see me with an entourage,” Melanie says. “Why’d they leave so quickly? Could’ve stayed a bit for a coffee. That wouldn’t have been weird at all.”

“You mean you _don’t_ go everywhere with bodyguards?”

“The tall one, I can see it, but are you really trying to sell me on Jon Sims as a bodyguard?”

Considering Melanie is both shorter and overall slighter than even Jon, that’s hilarious, but Sasha has no doubt Melanie wouldn’t let a thing like that stop her from pummelling someone if they really deserved it. Or maybe that’s the punk aesthetic talking.

“That’s how he gets you,” Sasha says nonetheless, nodding sagely. “No one sees him coming.”

“Ah, yes.” Melanie rolls her eyes. “The whole...haunting people’s dreams thing, right?”

“You still haven’t answered me about that.” 

“Because it’s not a funny joke? Obviously Georgie must’ve told him, and he decided to be even more of a dickhead than he usually is and do all of this and—look, whether or not you’re in on it, I’m not here to fight with you. I wanted to ask you a favour.”

“Right…” Georgie? Sasha considers Melanie, the downturn of her mouth and that raised eyebrow, challenging. It doesn’t look like she’ll be forthcoming, which means Sasha needs a moment to do some sleuthing. “Well, tell you what. I’ll get us our coffees, and you can tell me about this favour, yeah?”

This, of course, leads to a fair bit of back and forth about who’s paying, Melanie insisting because she’s got that favour, Sasha insisting to make up for the misunderstanding, neither of them accepting just going dutch, but she acquiesces to Melanie eventually.

“So long as you let me get the next one,” she says, and smiles the bright, wide smile that always makes Tim laugh about her being unfair and that makes Melanie blush to her roots, which are coming in a gentle auburn in contrast to the rest of the blue. She mumbles something in vague agreement and leaves Sasha to head to the counter.

By the time Melanie returns, Sasha has gone so far back through Georgie Barker’s social media that she’s found a gangly university-aged Jon trying his best to look cool for the camera in various blurry photographs and a few gaps have filled themselves. Jon and Melanie with a common friend, possible ex-girlfriend in one or both of their cases, and Melanie...assuming something she told Georgie in confidence got passed on to Jon? Like a weird bad dream, say?

She makes sure to save a particularly funny one to show Tim later before setting her phone aside, smile at full wattage again, thanking Melanie for the coffee.

The favour, as it turns out, is just library access in the Institute. 

“I passed by but they said the whole Archives was off because of a...worm infestation?” She looks even more weirded out when Sasha nods. “Do I...want to know?”

“Mm, depends. How recently have you eaten, and how much are you willing to believe in really weird stuff?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“I know you believe in the supernatural, you just haven’t had the best opinion of the Institute, as I recall.”

“Yeah, well...These days, I think I’m willing to have an open mind.”

“Sounds to me like you have a story of your own to tell. This wouldn’t have to do with the memes I’ve been seeing, would it?”

Melanie groans, hiding her face in her palm. She starts to explain, every other word punctuated by a grumbled curse, and Sasha laughs quietly.

“It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me. I’m off the clock here, I’m not going to ask for your statement or whatever. But...hm. It might be best if _we’re_ not the ones seen giving you library access.”

“Wow. You guys fucked up _that bad_ , huh?”

“Hey, we’re not the ones who got memed. Just...might be best not to associate yourself with the Archives for a bit. I’ll redirect you to someone who can help, but...would you be willing to do me a favour too?”

“So long as it’s not more of that dream bullshit.”

“No more of the dream bullshit, I promise.” Sasha leans closer, arms folded over the table between them, and says, “You know how to pick locks, right?”

*

“He’ll know,” Martin says, almost as soon as he sees her.

The cafe is right across the street from Tim’s flat, but Martin still insists none of them should be out alone, and so here he is, playing knight to escort her home. It stifles a little but, well. The Stranger’s still out there, and the Stranger doesn’t care how strong a feminist or independent a woman she is.

“Know what?” 

“Whatever you’re planning. Whatever you asked Melanie to do.”

“She just wanted a favour,” Sasha says, and offers her arm while she explains. It’s mostly because that limp of his still looks painful and she wants to help, but also because he’s looking fuzzy around the edges. Crowds always seem to do that, but proximity and touch from friends can sometimes help.

The fact he _accepts_ it, his small delighted smile and all, is a sign of progress. Even better, he doesn’t feel cold at all. 

“Uh-huh. And you’re saying you have someone who’s going to be going to the Institute and you didn’t take the opportunity to ask her to do something or get something? You and Jon have been complaining for _ages_ about lack of access to your files.”

“Even _if_ that was true...I don’t see why Elias would know. His attention is on us right now, and when _you_ did that plan of yours he didn’t see you coming, so why would he pay attention to a random YouTuber coming in to access our library?”

“Because it’s a random YouTuber? Whose only previous encounter with the Institute was through Jon?” 

He stops her while they wait for the pedestrian crossing, pulling his hand away, and she knows without asking that he’s going to try and switch their places so he’s between her and any oncoming cars. Bless. She raises her eyebrow at him. “Don’t be silly, Martin.”

“Fine. Fine.” 

His cheeks blotch pink, a bit, when he’s embarrassed, and that’s progress too. Colour is good. He’s washed out, when he’s sinking into the Lonely.

“Plus, you said she’d gone by asking for us already, not to mention the fact that if he’s paying attention to us _right now_ , he’d be paying attention to what you just told _me_. Elias knows better than to underestimate me this round. Assuming he did in the first place, I mean...He might’ve known who I was the moment I set foot in the Institute.”

“And you knew that was a possibility, didn’t you? That didn’t stop you from trying to fix things.”

The little stick man lights green, and she tugs Martin so they can cross the street.

“I guess…”

“My point is: if, _hypothetically_ , I’d been planning something, which I’m not saying I am. But if I were, there’s no harm in trying anyway. I mean, he must know Jon and Tim are out there looking for tunnel openings too.”

“Yes, okay, you’re right. Just...just be careful, Sasha. Don’t get overconfident. He’s...you really have no idea what you’re dealing with.”

A point that gets hammered home a bit too obviously, if you ask her, when they arrive at Tim’s door and find a package already waiting.

“What are the odds it’s just hiking gear?” Sasha says.

“Jon’s gonna flip if he sees this.”

“Then there’s no need for him to see it.” She picks up the box before Martin can protest. It rattles, something shifting inside as she balances it against her hip. “I’ll go find somewhere to throw them away.”

Martin sighs, turning to consider the stairs they only _just_ got up, and she’s quick to say, “It’s alright, I can do this by myself.”

“You know I can’t allow that. You’re in just as much danger even outside this door as you are anywhere else. My Jon got—”

“Yes, yes, kidnapped at his front door or whatever.” Sasha taps her fingers against the box. “Then I’ll just stow it away in Tim’s room and take them with me next time I go out. It’s fine.”

Martin pulls a face, clearly conflicted. “We don’t know what might be in that thing...Perhaps I should hold onto it?”

“ _You_ share a room with Jon. _And_ you don’t go out as often. He’s much more likely to catch sight of it if you keep it than if I do.”

She finally gets the door open and sweeps inside, where she beelines for Tim’s room, and that’s that.

Except Martin’s right. They _don’t_ know what’s in this and it seems...it’s a bad idea, isn’t it? To just shove something under Tim’s bed without knowing what it is? She should at least make sure it is actually just tapes and statements. If nothing else, so they know how to properly get rid of them.

Crouching on the floor, she tugs it back out from under Tim’s bed and, quiet as she can, peels enough of the tape from the box flaps so she can peek in.

A sliver of light gets through, just enough for her to see _Dear Sasha_ on the top page.

*

The doppelganger of Tim Stoker had, apparently, had a moustache, a fact Tim seems to find hilarious. Jon doesn’t see why, personally, or why Tim is so curious about the other world at all, but he supposes there’s not much better to do with all of them smacked flat by this Archive hangover nonsense, the doppelganger of Martin Blackwood is all too happy to indulge said curiosity.

“Beard too,” Martin whispers when Tim can breathe again. They’re all doing their best to stay quiet for Sasha, whose migraines have been getting worse and more frequent. Today it’s kept her in Tim’s room, lights out, scarcely moving. The least they can do is not make it worse. 

Or try not to. Every addition makes Tim laugh again, then shush himself, then laugh more, but Martin saying, “Yep, a beard. And like, a little patch right here,” just sends Tim into such hysterics that Jon finds it easier to just slide off of the couch—letting Tim fall onto his back, yes—and sit on the armchair instead. 

He could, should, just go into the guest bedroom. Jon has never been one for constant close contact, but...it feels like he should stay. It isn’t just a safety thing, although certainly he feels safer with them, knowing that someone will notice if he disappears, _but_ …

He should see. 

Little more than a week beyond their authorised leave and they already can barely stand, it’s not just Sasha. Tim has been grinning through the aches, but he collapsed when he tried to get up from the couch yesterday and, despite his protesting otherwise, he’s feverish. 

And Martin...Martin’s been moving even slower than before, careful as can be, and Jon can see some of his own tremors in Martin’s hands when he accepts a cup of tea. His breathing is laboured. 

Just like Martin said, they’re tied to the Institute. To Elias.

They’re trapped. 

And whatever they may or may not say on the matter, it’s Jon who trapped them. So he should _see_ what he’s done.

The only upside is that it seems that the symptoms of Archive-withdrawal affecting Martin as well has gone some way towards assuaging Tim’s concerns, at least to the extent he’s willing to talk and joke again. 

Hence, this. 

“ _God_ , he must’ve looked like _such_ a prick,” Tim says. And then Tim’s smile goes odd, a little wibbly on one side, and he props himself up on his arm to face Martin. But then, of course, his arm is a bit shaky, doesn’t look like it will support his weight for long, so he sits up properly, with Martin’s help. “Sorry. I shouldn’t—”

“S’alright,” Martin says.

Jon doesn’t see _how_ it could be alright, them speaking ill of his dead friend, but he supposes it must be different when it’s said dead friend’s very much alive counterpart. He tries to think of how he’d feel if this Martin started ragging on Original Martin but knows it couldn’t compare. He and Original Martin were hardly friends, were they? Jon made sure of that.

Martin rallies himself and continues with, “Anyway. He did. A bit. Look like a prick, I mean. Just a little bit, though, and mostly if you didn’t know him.”

“So. Just like our Tim, then,” Jon says. He isn’t sure if _that’s_ an alright thing to say either, but Tim barks a laugh and says, “Oi!” so it can’t have been that bad.

Then Tim says, “Come on, Martin, you can’t let him get away with that. Give me all your ammo on Other Boss.” And Jon’s stomach just drops away. “Awful sartorial decisions, ill-advised facial hair, a horrible haircut? Lay it all on me.”

Worst part is, Tim might not be able to see him—he’s sat up now, cross-legged and facing Martin—but Martin is looking right at Jon. And there’s that...what even _is_ that look? Jon’s never been especially good at reading the nuances of facial expressions but this is especially impossible. Drawn eyebrows and a flat gaze but his mouth is neutral, relaxed. It isn’t sadness, isn’t annoyance, maybe it’s just Martin’s thinking face and Jon’s looking too deep into it, but it burrows under his skin anyway 

He finds himself saying, “He shaved his head and it looks dreadful. Do with that what you will.”

Tim’s laugh is undercut by Martin’s, “Hey, wait, no.” 

And _now_ Jon can read his face. It reads: upset. 

“No, that’s not—it’s not the same thing at all.”

“It _did_ look dreadful, though,” Jon says.

“It was difficult for him, alright? My Jon’s as vain about his hair as _you_ are—”

“I’m not _vain,_ merely—”

“But after his hand got burned, and then there was the...well, the several attempts on his life, and the coma, and— _point is_ , leave him alone.”

And that is firm enough that Jon bites back his prepared retort. Even though it seems _unfair_ to him, somehow. A person should get to make fun of his own doppelganger. Especially when said doppelganger fucked up so atrociously. 

After a few exceedingly awkward beats, wherein Jon refuses to get up and leave on _principle_ this time and just fiddles belligerently with his watch strap, Tim ventures into more benign topics. Like the apocalypse.

“After all the post-apocalyptic books I worked on at my old job, it’s a liiiittle surreal to think we’re like...supposed to be the world-saving team.”

“Not quite the group of plucky teenagers, I guess,” Martin says.

“Wait, what? What does that have to do with anything?”

And then Martin has to explain how the post-apocalyptic trend in _his_ world had been largely teen narratives, _apparently_. That’s what Jon finds the strangest. How some things will have been the _exact_ same in both their dimension and Martin’s, and then randomly a handful of events or trends

(or people)

will be just _slightly_ skewed.

Jon knows not to participate this time. He tries to busy himself instead with tea—and then roasting Tim for always having too much milk _and_ leaving the tea bag in, like a heathen, not even touching on his frankly questionable biscuit choices—and then cleaning, slow as he can so as not to aggravate the Archives hangover, but of course goddamn Martin has to get up and start tidying as well. Jon is sure he’s doing it to be helpful, and it’s not like Jon wouldn’t immediately get up to help if someone started tidying around him too, but it’s irritating anyway. Especially his cheerful continued chatter throughout.

“I mean, once the cost of a Freddo hit 30p, we should’ve known the world was going to shit, but—”

“Wait, wait, back up,” Tim says, from where he has now stretched over the entire couch, hands behind his head. “What’s a Freddo?”

Martin laughs. “Oh, Christ. Er. It’s this little chocolate frog thing, Cadbury’s. Sometimes has caramel in it.”

“Right. And what’s the price of that have to do with the apocalypse?”

Midway through explaining what he has dubbed the Freddo Index, which apparently uses a chocolate bar as a measure of cost of living, Martin trails off. Jon glances up, a brief spike of anxiety in his throat, to see Martin pulling something out from behind the bookcase he’d been wiping down.

It’s a tape recorder. And it’s on. And he looks _impossibly_ fond.

Tim has, by then, noticed as well. “More spooky eyeball overlord stuff?”

“I, um...Well, maybe? I mean, assuming neither of you put it here?”

“Of _course_ not,” Jon snaps. 

“Right, yeah...um. In which case, it could be. It’s—they’re not...evil, though? I mean, I guess Beholding itself is pretty evil but...I don’t know. The tapes never did anything bad. They’re just... _there_ , usually.”

Jon stalks over—and oh, that was a mistake. His head swims, that tea feeling dangerously close to the surface—and snatches the tape recorder from Martin’s hand. He clicks it shut and sets it down on the table. 

“It was still recording,” he says.

“It wasn’t Elias,” Martin replies. “At least, I don’t think it was Elias.”

“Then what do you think it was?” Flavoured with compulsion that Jon didn’t (didn’t he?) mean, and that makes Martin’s answering smile _all the worse_. 

“I don’t know. Not for sure. All I do know is...when Jon was in a coma, they disappeared. And when he came back, I knew because one of them sort of...just manifested? They’re not dangerous, is the point.”

How couldn’t they be? 

They were him. Tapes were Jon. Other Jon manifested tape recorders out of thin air like a goddamned, emphasis on _damned_ , Disney princess, and here was one now, where none of them had placed it. Even though Jon had been so careful not to...

(lieslieslies _lies_ )

“Right. I need a cigarette.”

He needs to breathe.

White-knuckling through the nausea, he makes his way to his usual smoking perch by the kitchen window, wrenches it open, and sticks his head out. The air outside is scarcely better, but he takes deep lungfuls of it anyway. 

And since he’s already here, and Tim’s the sort of extrovert who thinks it’s a shame when people sit alone for too long, he might as well light a cigarette while he’s at it. It’s as good an excuse as any, and then they’ll stay away.

(Nevermind that smoking won’t help him breathe. Nevermind that.)

The tremor in his legs makes him lean heavily against the wall. It feels a lot like when he’s ignored his hand stretches, wrist brace, and proper posture for too long and his arms decide to make their displeasure known by being suddenly, absurdly weak and shaky, halfway to numb and unable to grip a thing. Except everywhere. 

He thinks of the statements Elias sent him, quickly trashed, but maybe not quick enough.

Wonders if Martin’s tapes count as statements.

Wonders if that’s why he’s getting off so easy compared to the others, what sort of powers might develop next, and takes a deep, shaking drag.

He nearly chokes on it when a voice that’s grown increasingly familiar to him asks, “What’s this? Bored of my tape already, Archivist? ”

The resultant coughing fit means Jon has to leave the window, reassure Tim and Martin he’s fine, and get himself a glass of water from the tap. But after that, of course he returns to the window, of course he does. He can’t just _not_ see if Gerard Keay is there.

And sure enough, when he peers to the left, there is an open yellow door where, before, he’s fairly sure there had been only featureless brick. Gerard Keay sits in the doorway, legs dangling in the air.

Gerard smiles, thin-lipped, and gives a wave. His hand is...normal. Human-sized. He looks younger than Jon had imagined. His hair, long, hangs limp as he leans out so he can look at Jon. It’s black, except for the roots, and for the life of him Jon can’t say what colour said roots might have been.

“I would say I’m hurt, but I try not to make my lies so...hm. _Obvious_.”

“What are you doing here?” Jon croaks, and glances over his shoulder. Mercifully, the others seem content not to check on him. For the moment, at least, they’re safe. “What do you want?”

“You can’t play my voice that often and not expect me to take it as an invitation.”

Jon hopes the heat creeping up his arms and throat doesn’t make itself obvious in his face too, but Gerard’s soft laugh says plainly that it does. 

That laugh makes his tremors worse. It doubles and triples on itself, like out of sync audio, like something wrong, like he needs to fix it. He drinks his water instead, clears his throat.

“It wasn’t _your_ voice. That was a - a different Gerard.”

“Was it? It sure _sounded_ like me. Oh, Archivist… ” A smile creeps onto Gerard’s mouth, much larger than it has any right to be. It reminds him, absurdly, of that Grinch cartoon. “When you look in a mirror, is your reflection also a different person?”

Gerard Keay serves the Spiral, and the Spiral feeds on confusion, on madness, that’s all. Sasha had reassured him that Melanie King said nothing about him haunting her. His nightmares are just that: nightmares. That’s all. 

That’s _all_.

“What do you _want_?” Jon says, and though he tries to be calm he has never been very good at regulating his voice.

Gerard tilts his head the other way. He reaches out a hand, and although it stops short...Jon can feel it. Unseen against the back of his hand, a thin pointy fingertip, cool as a sharp stone. He tries to hold himself still, breath and all, but the tremors make that difficult. 

Gerard says, “Can I have a cigarette?”

Jon sets his water aside. He’s shaking, but that’s the Institute withdrawal, not fear. He is not afraid when he pulls the pack of cigarettes from his pocket. 

He holds it out, and the unnatural hand moves to take a cigarette. It is lit before it even gets to Gerard’s mouth, though Jon couldn’t say when or how.

“Thanks,” he says. He exhales curlicues. “Sooooo, you want to talk to me about these reflections of ours?”

“Not particularly,” he says, though he does.

Gerard shrugs and says, “Liar,” with that curling grin of his, but doesn’t push beyond that. They smoke in surprisingly companionable silence. 

And when he crushes his cigarette in the ashtray and turns to leave, Gerard’s, “See you later, Archivist,” somehow sounds more a promise than a threat.

“I hope not,” he says, and that’s a lie too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eternal thanks to my lovely betas, rustkid and abbyleaf101.
> 
> Thank you all for reading! Any comments you might drop, theories you might have, general yelling at me for reasons of The Great Rice debate? All welcome and much appreciated. The next update will be **July 12th** , so I'll see you all then!


	3. Chapter 3

Sasha has gotten hiding the statements down to a science.

She lies on her front on Tim’s bed. There is a pillow to her right side, the side closest to the door, and another propped against the headboard. When she hears the creak of the floorboard and a shadow darkens the little sliver of light peeking from under the door, Sasha will lock her phone, pull the pillow down, and do her very best _ugh why are you waking me this is an affront to society_ scrunched up face. Tim says the strength of her disapproval reminds him of one of his countless unrelated aunties, which is great, as it means he doesn’t try to get her out of bed or get too close.

If he did, if Sasha had to move one inch, no doubt he’d end up seeing the statement she keeps hidden underneath her. As it is, she can typically get him to give her a few moments before she needs to come out for food or whatever it is.

This time, the interruption was just to offer her some coffee, which she accepts with mostly just a grumble.

Tim walks very carefully with it. Very slowly. Sasha understands why—she’s heard some of the crashes outside, she _knows_ they’re getting worse—but that doesn’t stop her feeling annoyed at the interruption, just...a bit guilty about her annoyance.

“Thanks,” she croaks.

She can’t see Tim’s smile in the dark but hears it in his voice when he replies, “Hey, don’t mention it. If you feel up to it, maybe you could come join us for a bit later? Martin wants us to watch this movie that was apparently pretty huge in his world. Could be fun.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Sasha says, knowing she won’t. “Good with Martin, now, are we?”

Tim makes a noncommittal sound. “If he did do anything...won’t find it out by keeping him at arm’s length, right? Your strategy seemed to work, so… And plus, like, with all of us in the flat together—”

“Sure, Tim.” Like she doesn’t know him and his big heart. Tim can lie, sure, can bluff, do all sorts, but he’s never been good at hiding how he feels about someone. If he thought Martin was a murderer, _actually believed it,_ they wouldn’t be having movie nights. Which...yeah, probably makes him feel worse, so she won’t call him out on it. “Well, let me know if you notice anything weird.”

And when Tim’s gone, she can push the pillow up again, settle on her elbows, and turn on her phone’s flashlight to get back to reading. She turns the paper over excruciatingly slowly, because, bless them, they’re all trying to be so quiet for her sake and she worries that even the rustling of paper can be heard.

She finishes the statement of Andrea Nunis and her tough crowd in Genoa and is satisfied and frustrated, both, that it didn’t really tell her anything new about the Lonely. Yes, crowds can prompt it and, yes, thinking of connections ward from it, she’s seen that herself with Martin. Interesting that Gerry showed up in this one, before he ran into whatever made him so weird, but otherwise...this just confirms what she already knew.

Sasha crawls out of bed and, why not, takes a sip of her coffee and grabs one of the Bourbon biscuits from the packet at her bedside. She keeps up the packet crinkling as she very carefully slides the box out from under Tim’s bed. In goes Andrea Nunis’ statement, in the neat pile of the ones Sasha’s finished. She makes sure to slide it with the other Lonely statements, gently so as not to crease the paper.

And there are a _lot_ of Lonely statements. Elias is...not terribly subtle about what are presumably his attempts to make her wary of Martin and, worse, not giving her anything interesting out of it either.

But at least not every statement is about the Lonely and its horrors and monsters. Some are Beholding, after all.

Statement of Rosa Meyer and her evil hand mirror, statement of Jonathan Fanshawe and the weird shit he found cutting up that von Closen guy, statement of Lucia Wright and her persistent nightmares of _meat_ and a little old lady who is _all eyes_ and who is, probably, none other than old Gertrie herself.

And she has to wonder what his point is.

Does he hope it will scare her into blaming jon? Alienating him, leaving him ripe for the picking? Or is he just being a shit and taunting her with the truth of what she’s serving, as though she's _unaware_ of what it means that she feels better for doing this?

Reading these statements, taking her notes, she’d have done it even without Elias asking her to in his letter, and she gets the sense he knows that, wrote it for that very reason. It’s basically already what she was doing at the Institute, and with the Head of the Institute’s blessing it must make her distance maybe less relevant.

She doubts that mattered to Elias, but it matters to her, and that’s the important thing. With even Martin succumbing to Archive hangover—Sasha having already tested and disregarded the hypothesis it may have been a Lonely-related hangover, actually, but no, apparently his tie to the Institute still stands—they need at least _one_ of them clear-headed. As usual, that falls to her.

Elias may have made her choice belong to him with that request of his. But Sasha has a lot of experience milking what she can from shitty, self-satisfied bosses, and if this means she gets to do her work _without_ falling apart like Tim and Jon and Martin, all the better.

He’ll regret it. She promises herself that she’ll make Elias regret it.

And, well, all the rest of the horrible evil stuff, of course, that too.

Skimming the first few paragraphs of the next statement in the unread pile, she catches the word _surveillance_ and ah, another Beholding one. Surveillance feels like a Beholding thing. Alright then.

She settles in her usual position, sliding the statement out inch by slow inch to read of Sunil Maraj and his coworker’s descent into apparently...becoming a surveillance camera? It seems like it’s headed that way, at least, but Sasha only gets as far as his coworker’s eyes being described as “glassy” when her phone vibrates in her hand. She drops it in her surprise, and it falls with a decidedly not-on-a-mattress thunk that makes her whisper, “Shit,” and hold her breath to listen.

Nothing. She can hear their chatter, still, but no footsteps. That’s good.

Disgruntled, Sasha unlocks her phone to see what interrupted her, ready to mentally curse whoever it is into oblivion.

She holds said cursing, though, when she sees Melanie King’s name, and a text with a picture of what looks like the tunnels. There is an envelope on the ground, and it’s addressed to the Archivist and his helpers.

 _Helpers?_ Melanie has sent. _Hey if this is the guy you were looking for, can I get a punch in first?_

Sasha huffs a laugh and types back, _If this is the guy we’re looking for, you may have to get in line._

Just about all of them have reason to hate Jurgen Leitner, after all. They may need his help but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a grudge.

_Could you send me a scan of the letter? Thanks, Mels._

They’ll need to go over it together to figure out the right response—well, first Sasha will need to tell Jon, Tim, and Martin that she asked Melanie to sneak into the Archives and unlock the trap door to bait Jurgen Leitner, _then_ explain it worked and see what Leitner has said, and _then_ draft a response.

First, though… Sasha lifts her phone and turns its light back to the statement, so she can finish the story of how Samson Stiller was absorbed by the Beholding.

*

The Institute watches.

Jon doesn't know if the others feel it as well, if there is anything _to_ feel and it’s only the Eye’s hold on him that brings the weight of its gaze so heavy on his shoulders, or if...if there’s nothing. If he’s imagining the way the building just _waits_ , and the weight is his own guilt, the prickling certainty of what he’s capable of.

He doesn’t bring it up, needless to say, because this is another question he doesn’t want the answer to and, anyway, they’re not even going to the Institute. And in a few moments, if certain people would _hurry up_ , they’d round a corner and be out of its line of sight entirely. Then Jon grimaces at himself, because that’s ungenerous of him, and just...tries to breathe. If Martin is slow, it’s because he was hurt protecting them, and he’s healing. If Tim is slow, it’s because they don’t want him getting lightheaded and collapsing again, because they’re hardly in any place to carry him, and what if he cracks his head on the pavement or—

It’s fine. He can wait. The Institute’s gaze is not a physical thing and will not hurt him. In fact…

Jon turns his head to look at it, very deliberately, because he _is not afraid._

It’s a lovely building. Imposing, with its Greek columns and clean lines, but lovely, and not at all out of place. It belongs here, it seems to say, will always be here. Does he? _Will he?_ Its windows are eyes and they _watch_ and Jon’s first thought, absurdly, is of that amulet his mother used to have hanging behind the door of their flat.

He doesn’t remember much about that flat, just bits and pieces, impressions more than anything else, but he remembers the round blue eye in the middle of a large—had it been brass? No, not brass, he doesn’t remember—stylised palm. He used to be scared of passing that hallway by himself. Would speed from room to room when he had to so that it didn’t see, until he heard something about dinosaurs and motion and took the opposite tack, being as slow and still as he could.

She’d laugh at him, he thinks. He can’t remember it, of course, but he’s fairly sure she laughed and, once or twice, flip the palm over so it wouldn’t be looking at him. It didn’t help. He thinks he told her that and she said...she said something along the lines of, it’s keeping an eye out for things that could hurt you, it’s keeping you safe.

He doesn’t remember if she had any terms of endearment for him, or what her voice sounded like, or even which language she was speaking in that instance or if she had an accent. He thinks, even more absurdly, of Julia Montauk’s statement, her mother’s pendant, which was nowhere near an evil eye or even related to it, being a _closed_ eye in fact, but that was all he could think of.

Maybe he should get himself one.

Then again, if Elias can see them through _any_ eye...

“—an’t believe you essentially baited him with food and he took it.”

“It makes sense. If he’s been living in the tunnels that long, processed everything, some fresh food would make all the difference. Anyway it wasn’t _that_ easy. Crusty old sod took a week of notes and food packs till he showed himself.”

“A week! Leitner’s been gone for decades and you think a _week_ is too much.”

“Yes, well, someone who knows his hiding spot and is warning him about a threat to his life is probably someone he wants to talk to.”

When Jon turns back, Tim and Sasha are ahead of him. Not too far, but far enough that he needs to hurry to catch up.

Martin is beside him, though. Waiting. He doesn’t look to the Institute, just smiles at Jon and says, “Alright?”

“Yes, of course. Sorry, I was just...distracted for a moment.”

“Happens.”

“We should catch up.”

“Yeah, guess we should.”

Jon makes sure to slow his stride to match Martin’s this time, irritating as it is. Martin had the decency to wait when he didn’t have to, or maybe he’d been left behind too, but either way Jon is...trying to be more considerate, so this is the least he could do.

“It’s okay, you know,” Martin says, with that gentle tone that always puts Jon on edge.

“Good to know that a nebulous _it_ is okay.”

Martin snorts. “Look, we’ve all been through a lot. And I know you haven’t been sleeping super well—”

“None of us have.”

“I know that. I’m just _saying_ , it’s understandable if you need a breather. Especially before we meet Leitner, given, y’know...”

“Given?” Jon says, half-turning towards Martin _just_ so he can see Jon’s raised eyebrow.

“Jon, are you _trying_ to be difficult? I’m not—I’m on your side here. I just meant, I know you have your whole Leitner thing and now he’s helping us and.” Martin cuts himself off with a huff. “Nevermind. We should catch up.”

And he hobbles along faster, leaving Jon just a half-step behind. Jon doesn’t match his stride out of, well, if he’s going to be honest with himself, spite. And maybe he _doesn’t_ want to see Jurgen Leitner. Maybe he _doesn’t_ want to have to seek refuge from one horrible old man by accepting the help of another.

It turns out to be moot, anyway, because even when they arrive at their designated meeting location—i.e. the alley behind Sasha’s favourite coffee shop for some absurd reason—it’s empty. It continues to be empty except for them, the occasional passers-by, an unimpressed scraggly tomcat, and rubbish, for _half an hour_.

“Wow, can’t believe you got stood up by an old tunnel hermit,” Tim says.

“Was worth a shot,” says Martin, who by now is leaning heavily against the wall to take the weight off of his leg. “Maybe we can try again later?”

Jon says nothing, because if he does all he’ll talk about is the itch of Eyes. They can’t see the Institute from here, but that isn’t to say it can’t see them. It’s taking everything Jon has just to keep from pacing or bouncing his knee or just _moving_ because he doesn’t want it to see him nervous.

Sasha also doesn’t reply, but she seems to feel no need to keep from pacing, and strides the length of the alley and back again, a different way every time, it feels like.

“Sash?” Tim tries.

“Shh. We’re not leaving yet. I know he’s here.”

“What?”

“Martin said he has books that give him powers, and if he’s been hiding this long one of them is probably a shielding or invisibility thing,” Sasha says, and turns on her heel to start a new circuit. “So we’re staying here until either he stops the game and shows himself or we find him.”

Jon tilts his head to where the Watching Itch is. And says nothing.

He is not surprised when, an age later, an old man appears in his line of sight like the figure in a popup book. The most mundane looking wizard, or maybe one of the countless ineffective parental figures that plague children’s books, Leitner is a little stooped, a lot wrinkled, but broadly unremarkable despite his obvious attempt at drama as he snaps his book shut. More than anything else, he looks haggard.

Martin’s the only one of them who jumps at the sound, but he’s also the one who immediately tries to swing out with his fist. Sasha barely avoids said fist, half-laughing as she waves away Martin’s apologies, while Tim says, “Huh. Guess you were right, Sash.”

“You couldn’t have made this entrance of yours a little earlier?” Jon says, drawing himself straighter. He tugs at the sleeves of his shirt. “I presume you’re—”

“Don’t,” Leitner, presumably, says. His voice is scratchy from disuse. “You’ve bandied my name about enough. Follow me, and quickly.”

Their _What do you mean_ and _Hey, hang on_ , and other protests are ignored as Leitner hurries out of the alley, leaving them no choice but to follow as he darts into another. Martin mutters something about _He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named,_ then explains to Tim the other-world pop-culture reference, but Jon loses the thread of it once Leitner pulls another book out of his pocket.

A few silent seconds, and the solid ground in front of Leitner shifts out of the way. Stone steps lead down in the darkness, not the most reassuring, but Leitner clatters down without waiting to see if they’ll follow and...well.

It isn’t like any of this is particularly reassuring in the first place. What is Jon waiting for, really?

He doesn’t know, but it’s a moment too long for Tim, who’s the first to forge ahead. Sasha calls out, “Your torch, remember!” before brandishing hers, turning it on, and following.

Martin glances over at him. “It’s probably fine,” he says. Soft, again, too soft. “The worms’ll be dead, and for the most part I think the tunnels make everything weaker? I forget if it’s because it counts as Beholding domain or because of Smirke but it’s—”

“It’s fine, Martin,” says Jon, who had forgotten, somehow, that the worms must have made their home in said tunnels for an _age_ , burrowing underneath them, and feels vaguely queasy to remember it. “It’s fine.”

“Alright, then. Guess, um...I’ll go first?”

He turns his torch on and turns to face the swallowing dark. The thin beam of light seems entirely inadequate and yet he takes one step, then another, slow only because of his leg. There’s no hesitation in the doppelganger Martin Blackwood, and Jon’s almost certain Original Martin would have been the same. Just like the rest. Jon’s the only coward here.

Absurdly, he finds himself watching Martin go down. More precisely, he watches Martin’s torch, not one of the new ones Tim had bought, this is otherworldly, apocalyptic. Asked if it needed new batteries, Martin had given a nervous chuckle and said he doesn’t know if it still runs on batteries, but he didn’t fancy opening it to find out.

Otherworldly torches, manifesting tape recorders...That’s his world now, that’s his normal. Like it or not.

When Martin disappears from the steps, Jon follows.

The square of sunlight slides closed behind him.

*

Finding Gertrude’s body and her cache of tapes is, as it turns out, a remarkably easy thing once they explain what they’re looking for. Apparently, Leitner always knew where she was.

“But where would I have moved her?” he says.

So he had left her there instead, sprawled on the ground still, three bullet holes in the front of her jumper, dark with dried blood. Her fingers are closed tight around a tape recorder, but it’s empty. Jon stands over her despite the stench and stares. Gertrude stares back.

Needless to say, he loses that contest.

In the periphery, Jon hears Leitner say, “She had a very particular order for those tapes. If they were meant for her successor, and I think they were, then I didn’t dare.”

“What, afraid she’d haunt you?” Tim, apparently unafraid of a haunting, steps over Gertrude Robinson’s body and heads for the shelves where said tapes are.

“Certainly not. If Gertrude had made a pact with Terminus, I’ve no doubt she would have made herself known a fair while back. But it seemed….disrespectful to an old friend. And, frankly, her successor would need all the help they could get.”

Leitner turns to look at him, watery blue eyes squinting behind glasses, an animal too long in the dark. Jon looks back, flat.

“Good. We’ve had to clean up enough of your messes as it is,” Jon says.

“Ah. That’s what brought you into this. I see.”

“You see _what_ , precisely.”

“Can you remember which book? My memory isn’t what it once was, but I’d be happy to tell you what I know of it.”

Jon stares at Leitner for a long, long moment. It would be helpful if his newfound monsterhood meant he didn’t need to blink but, unfortunately, he does, which lessens the impact somewhat, and loses this staring contest too. Eventually, all he can think of is, “I’m _sure_ you would be,” and decides that’s enough, he won’t dignify Leitner with any further response. There are tapes to catalogue, and he strides off to join Tim in examining the shelves.

Finding Gertrude’s body and her cache of tapes is, somehow, the least unsettling thing experienced in these tunnels. There is also:

  * The way the solid concrete below their feet parts at the reading of a few lines of a book, and Gertrude’s body falls with a dull _thunk_ into the darkness beyond before being covered back up or possibly crushed, they don’t know.
  

  * The way the others go back to work right after, buzzing through the room with all the tapes and discussing plans and projects.  
  

  * The way the vitality seems to have returned to the rest so, so very quickly. Even Martin hobbles across the room with more energy than he’s had in a good while.  
  

  * The way it has not returned to Jon, who still feels vaguely light-headed and trembly.  
  

  * The way that doesn’t stop him from hoping.  
  

  * Even when days have passed.  
  

  * Days and nights both, bled together into one dark mess of tunnels only broken by torchlight, because it was decided they’d be safer here, and now they have sleeping bags and food and water and furtive middle-of-the-night trips into the Archive for hygiene purposes.  
  

  * Jon looks at the stain that was once Gertrude Robinson, under which she’s been swallowed, and thinks _here lies an Archivist_ and knows he will be next.  
  

  * Also, since when is Sasha a fan of Jurgen sodding Leitner? Seeing them sat together, head bent over the few books he still has left, is possibly the strangest thing of all.  
  

  * No, nope, not the strangest thing, he was mistaken, because apparently the body of Jonah Magnus is somewhere in here as well, that being the true identity of Elias Bouchard.



Martin only now deigns to fill them in on this as they sit in the corner of the tunnels generously-termed their “living area,” over a spread of crisps and Tesco sandwiches. Jon, who had been wishing for a change in subject from Tim’s whining about how he hadn’t realised he'd forgotten his lactase when he chose his sandwiches and now he has to sacrifice the "cheesy goodness" for the greater good, clearly should have been more careful in making said wish.

“I didn’t know if it was true for here as well,” Martin protests. “I had to be sure, didn’t I?”

“It seems very unlikely to me that Elias Bouchard, of all people, would rise to Head of the Institute without some sort of intervention. If nothing else, the mere presence of the same person in the same position seems like it should have been a fairly strong indicator,” Leitner says, which is particularly appalling given Jon had been about to say something not too far from that.

Instead, Jon says, “Where would we be without your infinite wisdom. Nevermind the million other factors that have already been different between his world and ours, let’s just go about _assuming_ everything’s the same. That’s worked fine thus far, hasn’t it.”

It’s a matter of _principle._ Even aside from literally every horrible thing Leitner has, by his own admission, allowed to happen, Jon is not about to agree with a man who eyes a chicken and mango chutney sandwich with more suspicion than he does eldritch books.

Sasha, busy fishing the tomato out of her sandwich to deposit in Tim’s while he deposits his cheese in hers, doesn’t even look up as she drawls, “Boys, let’s not bicker again, please.”

“We’re not bickering, and we’re not children, so I would _appreciate it_ if you didn’t speak to us as if we were.”

“Okay, okay, I’m sorry.” Still not looking up, though. “The important thing is that we know now, and we can plan for it.”

Jon snorts. “Can we?”

“Yes. We can.” Her sandwich sufficiently de-tomatoed, Sasha wipes her hands clean. _Now_ , finally, she looks to Jon. “If we can find his body in the Panopticon, maybe threatening it would be enough to get us released from our contracts.”

Tim makes an unsure sound. “Dunno, Sash. Feels like mind-reading Double-Boss would be able to call us on our bluff.”

“And that assumes we’d be able to find the Panopticon, unless your new friend, here, has something else he hasn’t told us?” Jon says, and looks to Leitner from over his glasses,

“Ah, no...No, not with regard to that. It seemed...imprudent to barge in on the Eye’s seat of power when I was in hiding.”

“I mean, in the other world, Elias beat you to death with a pipe,” Tim says. His casual cheer in the face of Leitner’s discomfort is somewhat satisfying, although Jon is aware that probably makes him a terrible person. “So, yeah. Smart.”

“Aside from that…” starts Martin, gentle. “If he knows we know about the deadman’s switch... _and_ we don’t know if it applies to his physical body as well or not, then he also knows full well we wouldn’t risk killing everyone.”

“Threatening doesn’t have to mean _with murder_. What if we threatened to cut him off from the Panopticon?”

“Erm. Would…probably be as good as murder, honestly. Not sure he... _can_ be cut off at this point? It’s sort of...connected to where his, um, eyes should be.”

“Well, then, maybe we can threaten the whole damn Panopticon. Tim, you’re our Smirke nerd, wasn’t he all about balance and all that? So if we disrupt the balance, maybe we can ruin his all-seeing, all-knowing thing.”

“I guess,” Tim says, though he doesn’t sound terribly enthusiastic about it. “Assuming you could disrupt it the right way? And, y’know, not collapse the street above in the process.”

“Ah, an Archival team that isn’t immediately incendiary? How novel,” says Leitner.

"Hah. Seem to remember it was mostly Gertrude with the...uh." Martin trails off, his amusement wilting under Jon's incredulous look because _why are they all so chummy with Jurgen Leitner._ "Sorry."

Leitner, oblivious or perhaps wilfully obtuse, says, "The explosives, yes. She did also have me move the gas main closer to the Institute. I believe she was planning to burn it down when Jonah Magnus interrupted her."

Sasha makes a thoughtful hum through a mouthful of sandwich. Swallowing quickly, she says, "She had you and your tunnel-shifting book and didn't think to use it on the Panopticon? Or, well, I guess she might not have known where it is—"

"Or about it at all. She had her suspicions about Elias, but if she knew any more than that, she certainly didn't tell me."

"Can't imagine why," Jon mutters, though with no attempt at being unheard.

He makes no attempt to hide his disdain at any point in Leitner’s vicinity, really, and yet the man only leaves them alone when they’re bedding down for the night to go disappear into whatever hole he crawled out of again.

“Wow, dude must _really_ miss human contact,” Tim says.

“Lucky for us,” says Sasha, who glances up from braiding her hair for sleep to nod over at Jon. “Or Grumpy here would’ve chased him off ages ago.”

Jon straightens up from where he’s sat on the edge of a box, leaving his shoelaces untied to rest his elbows on his knees. He gets the feeling he doesn’t want to relax just yet. “What a tragedy that would be.”

“Come on, Jon. Be reasonable. It’ll take ages to go through the tapes, just the three of us, and if Elias—Jonah, whatever, if he makes a move before we’re ready, we need every scrap of power we can. So, really, if you’re not going to help, the least you can do is not antagonise someone who _will_.”

And there it is. He’s been feeling this coming since he first refused to listen to the tapes.

“Hey, no, that's not fair,” Martin says, and Jon holds a hand up to stop him.

“Forgive me for not trusting the man who wouldn’t even bury his “friend” for several years to lift a finger for _us_ , the strangers he barely knows.”

“I’m not _trusting_ him, but I’m also unwilling to throw away a valuable resource.”

“Those resources being Leitners? Tell you what, Sasha. Why don’t you go on up there and break into Artefact Storage, see if you can’t grab a few more while you’re at it.”

Tim interjects immediately with, “Jon, that’s a low blow,” and Jon gives an exaggerated shrug.

“It’s utilising valuable resources, isn’t it? Got to use everything we can since I’m being _so_ unhelpful. You know. Not wanting to be a world-ending monster and all.”

“Jon…”

“Martin, this isn’t the time to defend your boyfriend. He’s a monster. And I refuse to be the same.”

“That’s not what I—”

Sasha sighs like a long-suffering martyr, gaze to the ceiling and presumably asking for patience from whatever God will give it. “Nobody’s _asking_ you to be. God’s sake, Jon, these aren’t Elias’ tapes. They’re very unlikely to hold any agendas or hidden traps and—”

“Not hidden, no,” Jon says wryly. As though these tapes could be anything but.

“Gertrude left them _specifically_ for you. The Other You didn’t have access to all of these. For all you know, they could have the secret to fixing everything.”

“Oh yes. I’m sure it’s on those shelves somewhere. _How to Save the World From Yourself: a Ten Step Guide_. And as soon as you find that, I will most certainly listen to it, but _until then_...”

“Don’t be a prick, Jon.”

“Rather a prick than a monster.”

“The Eye has fed on these statements already, since Gertrude was the one reading them. They probably won’t have an effect.”

“I thought that was the case with Martin’s tapes too, and yet.”

Ah, and finally, something that gives her pause. Sasha looks between them. “...And yet what?”

“They didn’t tell you?” Jon smiles broadly. “I’m manifesting tape recorders now. You know. Like he does? Despite not “feeding the Eye.” So perhaps before you make all of these definitive statements, Sasha, consider the fact we don’t _actually_ know anything about these - these beings, or these powers, we don’t….I’m not taking any chances. ”

Sasha has nothing to say for once and, my, doesn’t that just kill her. He can see the frustration in the working of her jaw and knows she’s probably looking for another angle, mostly because that’s what he himself would do and, for all her condescension these days, he’s very aware of the fact he and Sasha often think alike.

Which is why he pushes against his knees to get up and says, “I’m going for a smoke.”

“Jon. Jon, wait, I’ll come with you.”

“No need. The tunnels are safe, right?”

“Sure, but it doesn’t hurt to—”

“I’m fine, Martin.” Which is somewhat undermined by immediately needing to steady himself against the wall. Unfortunately, the benefits of being under and occasionally nipping into the Institute have failed to rejuvenate Jon the way they’ve restored his Assistants, and he’s a bit wobbly on his feet. Sasha huffs like that makes her point for her. The important thing is he still has a head-start on Martin, who had already been snug in his sleeping back, and manages to stride quickly away before anyone can stop him.

*

It _does_ occur to him that he needs to not go too far. It would be far too easy to get lost down here, for one, even if he did luckily still have his torch in his pocket. For another, Gertrude’s corpse falling into that hole, the _sound_ of it, make him very conscious of how far the walls away from him at all times. Antagonising the man with the ability to move said walls is...in hindsight, not the smartest thing he’s ever done, but Jon can’t bring himself to regret it.

Approaching the crunching sound he started hearing two left turns away from their “living area” is also not the smartest thing he’s ever done, but if it’s worms then the rest should know and if it’s Leitner Jon can tell him to fuck off again, and if it’s something else…

It is, of course, something else.

“Did you steal that from our stash?” Jon says, gesturing with the light of his torch to the Hula Hoops packet held in Gerry’s…

Oh. His hands.

Gerry has always kept up the human facade around him, aside from the fact he’s persisted in popping up at the side of the building. He’s chosen to ignore that now, or maybe the tunnels interfere with that ability, and he sits here, too-long legs braced against the other wall and long, impossibly sharp fingers ringed with more Hula Hoops than Jon has ever seen one packet contain. Gerry lowers another to his mouth, closes his teeth around the vaguely potato snack, and pulls it off of his finger, then closes his jaw with a definitive, obnoxious crunch.

In the torchlight, there is a reflective sheen to the tattooed eyes on each impossible joint.

Jon finds his breath again. Inhale, exhale. It’s fine. “Is that supposed to be ominous?”

Gerry grins over at him. “What, a man can’t eat?”

“We both know you’re not a man.”

“Makes two of us, then, doesn’t it?”

Inhale. Exhale.

“I thought you said you didn’t know the way,” Jon says. “And yet here you are.”

“Mmmmmyes, I suppose I am.”

“You couldn’t have saved us the trouble? Do you realise the indignity of being behol—indebted to Jurgen Leitner, of all people?”

“Oooh, that just grinds your gears, doesn’t it, Archivist?”

Grin. Crunch. Jon closes his eyes against the urge to smack his head against the wall. Instead, he turns and sags against it. Not relaxing, quite, but it’s been a long day and talking with Gerry is never not exhausting on some level. Compulsion is all well and good except when you’re not careful about loopholes.

Actually, no. No compulsion isn’t good. Damn it.

“He’s disappointing,” Jon says, and sighs. “Horrible of me to say, isn’t it? But he’s—the name, _Jurgen Leitner.._.it’s haunted me for so long that I suppose…”

“You thought you would find something more impressive to hate,” Gerry says.

“Yes, that’s right, you’ve met him, haven’t you? He said the one time he’d gone up a few years ago, he’d been beaten half to death by an angry goth.”

Gerry tilts his head to one side, then the other, like he’s weighing the words. “No…”

“No? Lot of angry goths running around looking to beat up Leitner, then?”

“No. It was Gerry. But it was not me.” And he closes his teeth around another Hula Hoop, pulling it off of his very, very long finger.

“Ah.”

“He was disappointed too.”

“Right.”

Whoever Gerry did or did not consider _him_ varied moment to moment and mostly depending on whatever point he was trying to score. Jon has tended to assume it’s a Spiral thing, or possibly occasional dissociation due to whatever trauma led to his present...Spiralling? Either way, he doesn’t push. The others are difficult to speak to about this, all reassurances that they’re “in this together,” instead of accepting the reality that he’s turning into something and there’s nothing any of them can do about it short of...

Well, short of Eric Delano’s solution.

Which would be leaving them alone and opening the position up for some other poor soul to get shackled into. And when he is generous to himself, Jon thinks that is why he stays, despite it all, still the Archivist.

When he isn’t, he knows it’s because he’s a coward and the idea of being alone and unable to see the horrors that might plague him as well is, no, too much. He can’t.

And because Gerry is the only that looks him in the face and calls him monster, Jon stays, listening to that irritating crunch-munch and silence. He doesn’t even smoke. He pulls out his pack of cigarettes, sees it’s just got the one left, and where did all the rest go? Felt like he’d just gotten this. When did he smoke them? So he ends up just fiddling with his lighter instead. Not a conscious decision just...He doesn’t want to right now.

A long, sharp finger rests in front of his nose. There is a Hula Hoop dangling from the fingertip.

“Ah, no thank you,” Jon says. And then, like he sprung a leak, more words tumble out. “Did you - know? When you were...becoming this.”

“A monster, you mean?”

“...Yes.”

“Yes.”

“How did it…”

“What do you _really_ want to know, hm? The point of no return?” Gerry hangs his head back, long black hair melting into shadow, and he just _looks_ at Jon. He always has a way of _looking_ at him, like he knows everything there is to know. And finds it funny. “Do you want to know if it hurt? If I _felt different_?”

Maybe it’s time to push after all. “You refer to Gerry before as...separate.”

“And you refer to the Jon-that-was-and-will-be as separate too.”

“I refer to the one from the Other Dimension as separate. Which you don’t, notably. But not the me from last month or last year or the me that had the rotten thought to apply to this job. Those are—they’re still _me._ And in hindsight, yes, maybe, I can see where I might have—where I’ve unwittingly brushed too close to the Eye…I can see it in Sasha right now, in fact. But you were close to the Eye too, how did...What happened?” He knows he’ll get laughed at, but he also knows the easiest way to get information is often to offer up an incorrect version of them. “Was it a Leitner?”

As expected, Gerry laughs.

And when the headache that is his laughter abates, he says, “It was an Archivist,” and Jon feels those words jolt right through him, fizzle through his nerves and he knows, he _knows_.

“Gertrude did this. God. Of course...Sasha’s so fond of Gertrude’s no-nonsense methods but this is what that means, isn’t it? Not a _single_ assistant left—she might not have given herself over to the Eye but had no trouble courting other powers, I’m sure. Anything for her own gain, so long as it wasn’t her on the line.”

And with all of the rituals she disrupted, she might have told herself it was justified as well. Get a bit of power to try and save the world and then, what? Kill the monster when it had fulfilled its purpose?

Gerry’s voice is very close and very soft as he says, “It sounds to me like you might be thinking of someone else, Archivist. At least Martin was already half fog-bitten when you found him, hm? That’s not on you. If anyone _else_ has a nibble of your little friends…”

“I won’t...no, I won’t allow it. They might not want to listen to me, but. They don’t have to.” Jon turns to meet Gerry’s gaze, steady despite the uncomfortable proximity. “You have experience destroying Leitners. Tell me how.”

*

With the worst of the Institute’s workaholics all currently in the tunnels underneath it, they feel safe taking turns emerging from said tunnels and into the Institute proper. And since Jon is still not talking to her, it’s no surprise Martin’s elected to stay behind with him, so it’s just her and Tim this time. They wash up in Artefact Storage’s decontamination showers, raid cupboards for tea and snacks, grab files and, now that Melanie had unlocked document storage for them that morning, go and see what else survived.

Emerging from the trap door into the stacks again is still a bit surreal. It’s clean, organised, possibly more organised than they’d left it, even, and still smells vaguely chemical from whatever they used to disinfect after the worms, but document storage is somehow even weirder. Aside from locking the door, Sasha’s initial peek and flashlight sweep of the room seems to suggest nothing was changed. She doesn’t quite remember how she left everything but...those are Martin’s pyjamas pooled over the end of the cot, there are the clothes they got him, messily folded and spilling out of a box. The plastic plant. That weird stuffed cow.

“Oh, hey, Angus survived!” Tim says, throwing the door open.

“Tim!” she hisses.

“Sorry,” he says, but still isn’t keeping it down. “But, I mean, we did just come down from Artefact Storage. There’s no one here. And even if there is, what’s the chances they hear us all the way down in the basement?”

“Don’t you think there are more _important_ things to get from here?” Sasha says, and gently closes the door behind her. There are boxes of statements here too, possibly all bogus but they won’t know till they go through them, which should be easier now that they know the patterns to look out for.

The fact Other Jon can apparently just _sense_ which ones are real does make her slightly resentful this Jon won’t even _try_ , but they would just have to work with what they had. Obviously they can’t just drag _all_ these boxes down to the tunnels, but she flicks the lights on and grabs the first box she sees to sit on the cot and sift through it.

“You kidding?” Tim says. Instead of helping. “Nothing more important than this little guy. Can you imagine this fucker survived the apocalypse _and_ a worm attack? Good luck charm, if you ask me. Besides. Martin will be happy. Reminder of Scotland, his Jon, their burning romance, etcetera.”

He plucks up the cow plush and tucks it under his arm. “C’mon, Angus. We’re counting on you to save the day.”

“Oh? We know it’s a romance for sure now, do we?” She flips through a statement quickly, discards it to her left.

“Mm, Jon heads off to sulk in his corner more often than not now, so we got plenty of private time to talk.”

Another statement. “Sounds like you’ve gotten proper buddy-buddy.”

“Yeah, hey, speaking of that…” Tim’s voice is faux-casual in a way that tells Sasha he’s probably been rehearsing this in his head, waiting for the right opening. Alright then. “How come you told Martin what I told you?”

Sasha trips over a word she’d been reading but she doesn’t want to show a reaction, so she doesn’t. “Gonna have to be more specific than that, Tim.”

“Please don’t bullshit me, Sash. You know what I’m talking about.” When she doesn’t answer, he huffs, throwing up his hands. “You told Martin I was just trying to get dirt on him.”

“Well.” She pretends to read. “No. I said you still had your doubts about him. I thought it would make him more inclined to share things—and it has, clearly.”

“Uh-huh. See, I thought so? But then the other day you talked about not wasting valuable resources or whatever, and it got me thinking…”

“Dangerous, that.”

For once, Tim doesn’t rise to the bait. Sasha discards the statement in her hands, goes to grab another, when Tim puts his hand over hers to still it. She sighs and looks up at him, oddly unsmiling.

“It got me thinking about how this could have gone if he hadn’t told me. If he ended up reading into every interaction we had and feeling accused. Between me, and how much he misses his Jon with _this_ Jon here as a reminder...would’ve been pretty Lonely, huh? Like, capital letters, spooky Lonely.”

“I can see you’re angling to a point, Tim, so if you could get to it so I can scan through these statements…”

“Fine. Don’t poke at Martin’s buttons or whoops, say something _accidentally_ insensitive that reminds him he’s here alone just to see what makes his Lonely powers tick. And don’t pressure Jon into listening to the tapes. Don’t treat us like resources, Sash, because we’re not. We clear?”

“Excuse me?”

“Are we _clear_ , Sasha?”

“Timothy Stoker, you do not get to talk to me like this.”

“Sasha James, you do not get to hurt our friends like this. Because they _are_ our friends. Remember that.”

Sasha pulls her hand out from under his and draws herself to her feet. Still not Tim’s height, but better than being sat so he can loom over her with his patronising nonsense. “I am not trying to hurt anyone. What I am _trying_ to do is protect you all.”

“We don’t _need_ protecting. We need you to let us in on whatever decisions you’re apparently making and let us decide how we can help. You realise we’re not children, right?”

“You sure about that? Because it seems to me like _every_ concrete step we’ve taken has been _me_ pushing it, _my_ decision, while the lot of you were content to play house or whine about whatever you did in an alternate universe.”

“Now, that’s not true—”

“At the very least, if I left things to you lot, we’d still be thinking Our Martin was alive.”

It’s out of her mouth before she can really think about it. Tim rears back, his eyebrows shooting up, and he says, “Wow,” and nothing else, and that’s the real sign she’s maybe gone too far. Reckless, Sasha, this isn’t how you keep your allies.

She’s just going to have to swallow her pride and fix this. “Tim…Look.”

“Wow, no, you know what? Fuck you.”

“Tim, come on.”

“I didn’t even get to the box of statements you _mysteriously_ didn’t get rid of—like, I thought, hey, maybe Sasha was giving me plausible deniability in case Jon found out, maybe she didn’t want to worry me, but no, you just think I’m—”

“Did you go _snooping_ after me?”

“It was under! My bed! Don’t exactly have to be a genius detective to—and anyway _you_ of all people don’t get to be mad about someone snooping. _Proper_ servant of the Eye, aren’t you?”

Sasha tilts her chin up. “If that’s what it takes to beat Jonah Magnus, then yes, maybe I will be.”

Especially now it’s clear that she was right not to trust _any_ of them to be useful. Jon’s too frightened of his own shadow to do anything, Tim has _apparently_ sided with them over _her_ , and Martin…

Well.

Martin’s cleverer than she gave him credit for, admittedly, but that just means she can’t depend on him either. Her tentatively formed plan will just have to shift gears a little. And maybe accelerate. The last thing she needs is for one of them to go off half-cocked and give Elias more leverage against them.

Tim just shakes his head and leaves, taking nothing with him but that damned useless Highland cow plush. At least it gives her time to go through some of these boxes without more interruptions.

Even better, it means she doesn’t have to make up a reason to head up to the third floor when she’s done, folded letter in hand, to carefully slip under Elias’ office door.

She can fix this later. _After_ she’s saved the world and their lives.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew, this one's a doozy, isn't it? I really look forward to seeing what y'all think Sasha's up to.
> 
> Now then, a certain someone who shall not be named went and took part in the Rusty Quill Big Bang, forgetting the deadline for first drafts was _also_ their posting day deadline, and promptly fucked up their wrists in the process of careening wildly towards the finish line. I know, I know, I shouldn't have, but welp. Here we are. Unfortunately, this means I'm going to need a bit of a break from writing, so I am tentatively putting our next update deadline one month from now.
> 
> In the meantime, kudos and comments are forever appreciated, and feel free to say hi to me on tumblr @evanescentjasmine!


	4. Chapter 4

Jon had avoided the awkward tension he’d imagined waited for him by returning to their stretch of the tunnel only after everyone had already gone to sleep. Unfortunately, it’s still waiting for him when he wakes up, which feels a bit unfair considering the absurd dreams that have been plaguing him. It’s hardly as though his sleep has been restful.

Without his glasses, all he can see of the other three are their dimly-lit fuzzy outlines, already sat up. Presumably, by the sound of wrappers and Martin’s jaw clicking, having breakfast. And all of them uncharacteristically quiet. He feels sure they’ve noticed him, of course they have, that’s why they’re quiet. Just waiting to tell him off for going into the tunnels alone, for saying those things, for being useless, the list is long and varied. 

It’s tempting to close his eyes and pretend to go back to sleep. But the thought of lying there and just _waiting_ for whatever they have to say is worse, so Jon pulls an arm out of the sleeping bag and feels for his glasses on the tunnel floor beside him. 

“Oh!” Martin says, like he’s just noticing Jon’s awake. “Oh, er, good morning, Jon. D’you want some breakfast? There’s some cereal bars or, um, I guess you don’t usually like sweet first thing—there’s sandwiches from yesterday too? Bit more substantial, at least.”

The _unrefrigerated_ and probable vectors of food poisoning sandwiches? No, thank you. Of course, it’s only after he voices this that he puts his glasses on and realises Martin is, in fact, _eating_ one of said sandwiches and lowers it slowly, looking caught-out. 

After stammering through various attempts to get his foot out of his mouth, mentally calculating what the probability of food poisoning is and if he wants to chance it, Martin saves him from both maths and himself by offering a knowing smile and a fistful of cereal bars. 

“You don’t have to,” he says. “Here.” 

Jon grabs the first one with mumbled thanks, doesn’t even check the flavour, and tries not to look too relieved. It tastes of lacklustre cinnamon and what the manufacturer thinks is apple and it’s as dry as a mouthful of gravel. 

God, he needs a cigarette. Hasn’t even been a day and he already regrets his half-baked decision to quit, especially when he knows he has one left, burning a metaphorical hole in his pocket. 

No, it’s fine, he’ll be fine. He’s done this before. Just needs to distract himself.

Now that he looks up, he’s somewhat gratified that Tim has also opted against food poisoning with a bar of his own, and Sasha…

Is not there.

What he had taken for her outline, before he put his glasses on, is in fact just their stuff piled into the corner.

“Sasha gone for a coffee run, I take it?”

“Dunno,” Tim says, sullen. 

Martin pats Tim’s outstretched leg without even looking at him, a gesture so familiar it grates. “She was gone before we woke up,” he says.

“Oh. She didn’t leave a note or anything? Have you tried calling her?” 

“No.” Tim takes another bite of his cereal bar. 

“Bad reception down here,” Martin explains, and there is the most bizarre expression on his face, like he and Jon have agreed on something previously that Martin is trying to pointedly remind him of.

...Was it his turn to go out and get something? Mm. No, no he would have set a reminder on his phone. 

Oh. No, he knows what this is. Martin is implying Jon should go find her, isn’t he? Because presumably their altercation is what caused this sudden disappearance of hers. 

“Well, as I said, she must’ve just gone for coffee,” Jon says. “Or, isn’t it the weekend? Could have decided to work topside. Or she’s gone off to—Martin, what _are_ you trying to tell me? I’m sure she’s fine wherever she is without all of your meaningful looks and absurd hand-gestures.”

Martin freezes mid hand-gesture, a wide-eyed and frankly comical look of mortification on his face that settles into exasperated a moment later, lips pursed thin. Jon looks unimpressed right back at him. If Martin’s going to imply this is Jon’s fault, he should at least have the decency to say it out loud.

Tim glances between them and lets out an exaggerated sigh. “Martin was just trying to be nice for my sake, Boss. Me and Sash had a, er, bit of a falling out the other day.”

“...What?”

Sasha and Tim had been more or less a unit since Tim had first joined the Institute, practically the first week in fact, heads bent together conspiratorially more often than not. The only blip Jon can think of was when they’d made the disastrous decision to try dating, but even that they bounced back from. 

“Yeah. Wasn’t nice what she said to you. Or what she’s been doing to Martin. I tried to set her straight, but—”

The idea of _Sasha_ being told off and not him is too strange to touch right now, so what comes from his mouth instead is, “What do you mean, what she’s been doing to Martin?” Brow drawn, he looks to Martin.

Martin has a wry smile as he says, “I don’t think she meant anything bad? But, yeah, she...I think she’s been trying to test the limits of the Lonely. In me, I mean. What triggers it. What eases it. And...I can tell when I’m being goaded. I don’t much appreciate it.”

And there’s that jarring moment of, oh, yes, this is Other Martin, which, really, Jon should have gotten used to by now. He realises a moment later that part of him still expects stammering, backtracking, a reassurance it’s nothing, _really_ , especially when it’s Jon asking. Part of him still expects a smaller man. 

Or. No. A man who makes himself smaller. And that is not this Martin Blackwood. 

As is customary by now, he exhales a silent apology to the oth—to Original Martin before saying, “I’m...I didn’t notice.” Of course he didn’t. He didn’t even notice when Original Martin died and got replaced. “I’m sorry, for what it’s worth.”

The wry smile softens, turns warm. “It’s worth a lot. Thanks, Jon,” Martin says.

The warmth is uncomfortable, curling, twisting in Jon’s gut. He takes another overlarge bite of dry cereal bar and looks away, to where Tim is giving them both a considering look. After a few beats, Martin says, “Anyway, she was due to meet Melanie today, I think, so I’m not too worried about her being alone. If she isn’t back by dinnertime then I’ll go find her, but I’m sure she’s fine.”

Tim makes a noncommittal sound. “Jon, you mentioned a coffee run. We should probably do that before you bite our heads off.”

“Like you aren’t irritable without your caffeine as well, Stoker.”

“ _Me_? I’m an angel.”

Martin chuckles, then glances up. “Well, since it’s the weekend we can probably get away with just raiding the break room? Means we don’t have to be topside as long.”

Even when they all agree, it takes a good few moments for their shambling group to actually get up. Despite the sleeping bags and the little comforts they’ve managed to squirrel into the tunnels, they’re not quite a comfortable space, and the cold has slid an ache into Jon’s joints. Tim’s too, if the sound he makes as he finally gets up and stretches is any indication, and although Martin doesn’t say anything, his limp is more pronounced when he moves.

They bring their phones so they can charge them at their desks as well, since they act as decent torches and time wasters in a pinch, and Tim grouses about it the entire way to the hatch that leads up to the Archives. 

“I’m just saying, like...if old man Leitner can move a gas pipe, you think he could get an outlet down here at least. How did he survive all this time without at least trying to get some electricity?” 

“Electricity doesn’t tend to go well with, er, spooky stuff, I don’t think,” Martin says 

“Well, then what use is it? Honestly, I bet it’s just because all of our spooky contingent is stuffy old Victorian men who thought electricity was the devil. If _I_ were in charge, I’d make sure all spooky spaces are equipped with enough outlets for at least a kettle and a rice cooker.”

Martin huffs a laugh. “Rice cooker? Not, I dunno, a laptop, phone charger, anything like that?”

“Well, presumably the outlets could be swapped out when needed, but even if they couldn’t, rice cooker, hundred percent. Wouldn’t have survived uni without it. You can make a ton of shit in that thing; porridge, pancakes, soup, frittata, but honestly even if you couldn’t I’d still always want one in my kitchen. And yes, Jon, I know you can make rice on the hob, but why _would_ —”

“I didn’t _say_ anything,” Jon protests.

“No, but you were gonna. I know you too well.” 

“Hmph.”

….Well, you _can_ cook it on the hob, and that’s how you get his favourite bit, crunchy golden rice at the bottom of the pot, but he isn’t about to resurrect the Great Rice Debate from another angle. Martin and Tim seem content to joke about the various things they’d change if they were part of the original, sigh, “spooky contingent,” and that seems to him a much better way to try and diffuse the weight that’s rounded Tim’s shoulders as they shuffle to the trap door. 

Jon’s first up the stairs, since Tim is helping Martin despite Martin’s protests that his leg is fine and he doesn’t need it, and manages to push the door up without making any embarrassing exertion noises this time. 

The lights are on. 

“I told you she’s probably working topside,” he says, though under his breath and mostly for his own satisfaction at having gotten it right. He’s aware Tim will likely be less pleased with the fact they would have to cross Sasha to get to their promised caffeine, but...well, they’re going to have to talk again eventually. 

Perhaps if Jon goes on ahead? Not like he and Sasha are on the best of terms right now, but there’s less to be fraught about. 

He leaves the trap door open and strides on ahead, out of the stacks and into the lit offices, and starts to say, “Good morn—”

When Melanie King scrambles up from behind Sasha’s desk, sending a stack of papers careening to the floor.

“Oh. Ms. King.” Jon draws himself straighter, painfully aware of the oversized t-shirt and flannels he hadn’t thought to change out of. But he had at least taken the fact he was going to be seen by coworkers into account when picking his sleepwear, so none of it is frayed or holey or stained, merely sleep-rumpled. Small mercies, although he can’t begin to fathom the state of his hair. 

He adjusts his glasses and clears his throat, which makes her glare up at him from where she’s picking up the papers for some reason.

“Good morning. What are you—” No. Compulsion, remember? “I, ah...Martin mentioned you’d be meeting Sasha, but I didn’t realise you’d be joining us here.”

“What are you wearing, Sims?” she says, in lieu of any sort of greeting. 

“Contrary to popular opinion, I’m sure, I do not _live_ in formalwear.” Jon tugs the bottom of his t-shirt down, straightening it out. Or trying to. “Especially as it is not particularly comfortable to sleep in.” 

He waits several awkward moments for some response from her, and only gets the sound of shuffling papers, a ticking clock, and Tim and Martin slowly making their way out behind him. 

“Well. Try not to make too much of a mess, anyway. Good day.”

It’s probably more polite to offer her a cuppa since they’re making drinks, but he doubts she’d accept it and, anyway, Tim and Martin are the nice ones, no doubt they’ll take care of the necessary politeness. With a thin smile, he angles himself for the door, and has the full intention of striding out with all the dignity he can muster until she says, “What’re you playing at, exactly?” 

He takes half a step back, head tilted her way. “Er...Sorry?”

She thuds down the stack of gathered (and very messy) papers on Sasha’s desk. “What is this, exactly? Because I told Sasha it isn’t funny. Except I didn’t tell anyone this time, so what the fuck?”

“You told…?”

Sasha.

Who is the one who contacted Melanie and Naomi Hearne with regard to their dreams. Who cheerfully told Jon there was nothing to worry about and that _his_ dreams were just regular nightmares of statements he’d heard or what he feared he might be capable of. And who has, apparently, been prodding at the edges of Martin’s “powers” for a while now.

Jon had had a dream last night.

“You...saw me,” Jon says, breathless, and knows it’s true. “I-In your dream. The other night, you—you dreamt of the hospital again, and Sarah Baldwin, and you...saw me.”

“Wait, what?” comes Tim’s voice from behind him. 

“Oh, no,” Martin’s, softer.

Melanie sounds like she’s on the edge of laughter, but her face is a grimace, unsure of precisely what it wants to say. “Sasha said it was just a joke. A nasty joke after Georgie told you what I told her.”

“I...haven’t spoken to Georgie in, ah, quite some time, I assure you.” His mouth twitches in what is almost a smile, though he doubts a successful one. “Though I realise that isn’t the most assuring, now that I think about it.”

“Wipe that look off of your face.”

He rolls his lips back to get his expression under control. “Sasha has been...She told _us_ it was nothing.”

Melanie crosses the room towards him, so aggressive that he flinches back when she’s close enough, but all she does is prod him in the chest and lean in close. “Whatever you are,” she hisses, “Stay the fuck out of my head.”

“I don’t—It’s hardly as though I _mean_ to. I don’t like it either.”

“I don’t _care_. Stay. Out.”

She leaves without another word, scooping up her messenger bag on the way out. They hear her boots stomping all the way upstairs, and then the only sound is the ticking clock and Jon’s pulse in his throat. 

“Jon,” Martin starts to say, that unbearable softness. Jon pulls his arm away preemptively, and doesn’t look back to see if Martin was in fact reaching for him. 

“I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised. Given everything you’ve told me this morning. Makes sense, after all, if she’s already lied about other things.”

And he’d known already, hadn’t he? If he was honest with himself. Much as he’d known about the statements, and that there was something wrong in these Archives, and so many other things. He’d only...chosen to believe. It had been nice to believe, to let Sasha reassure him it was all going to be fine. But if he was manifesting tapes, why shouldn’t he be haunting dreams too?

“Come on,” Tim says. “Tea, coffee, all that. Then we can talk about this.”

Jon doesn’t want to talk about this. But with no idea where either Sasha or Leitner are, he has no other options. Running off into the tunnels won’t help, and anyway his legs feel too brittle to trust. So he follows. Maybe tea will help.

*

“Hey, sorry that call took so long, I was just...”

Sasha trails off as she realises, a step into the Archives, that Melanie is gone. Her bag isn’t there either, so it’s not like she just went to the bathroom or anything. Sasha swears under her breath and pulls her phone out again to shoot Melanie a text.

Her reply, a bare few seconds later, is, _Fuck you and fuck your boss._

And her first thoughts are Elias, because after all she _had_ just been talking to him on the phone. But then, well, if he was on the phone he couldn’t have been here, right? Anyway, Melanie doesn’t know Elias. Yes, he could have sent something but the more likely explanation is right here, underneath a trap door. 

Jon. Fuck. 

It’s like as soon as her back is turned to take care of something, everything else falls to pieces. First, the others find one of the tape recorders she’d stashed around Tim’s flat—because look, they need evidence of their voices that won’t get overwritten, in case the Stranger does get one of them, and...maybe they don’t need as many tapes as she’d stashed to do that, but given how little tapes can record at a time it’s good to be ready, and backups are never a bad thing. She doesn’t even know if it was one of the ones she’d turned on in her infrequent trips out of Tim’s room, but apparently it’s to thank for Jon being utterly useless.

And now Jon’s gone and, what, antagonised Melanie too? Driven her off? Did he compel her? Ask about the dreams? God, no wonder he accidentally ended the world in that other dimension. Would it kill him to _think_ for once?

Sasha rubs a hand up and down her face, pushing her glasses up to just press her fingers over her eyes for a moment. The urge to march down to the tunnels and let him know exactly how much he fucked things up for her—and all of them! She’s doing this for all of them!—is strong, but it passes, and she’s left instead with a frustrated wistfulness of thinking what it would be like to have _literally anyone_ she could depend on. 

Her phone screen flashes again. Elias.

Right. More important things to worry about.

Sasha rolls her shoulders back, takes a deep breath, and grabs her phone to head back up the stairs to where the reception isn’t utterly rubbish. She’s sure he’s Watching, so although she ascends quickly, she is neither rushed nor hurried. Maybe it’s pointless, maybe he saw her frustration a moment before, but in the very slim possibility that he hasn’t, she’ll make sure she’s collected when he Looks at her. 

When she gets to the top, she answers with a curt, “Elias.” Inside, she is trembling, and is somewhat satisfied none of it is in her voice. “That was fast. You’ve considered what I said?”

She has to wonder if he’d stretched their previous call out just enough so that Jon could run into Melanie. Or if he ended it so she could see what happened, and know she was alone.

“I have,” he says. “While I understand the source of your apprehension, I’m afraid this simply must be done in person. A contract signed and slid under my door is, mm...not quite the same.” The smarmy smile is audible in his voice as he adds, “Not to disparage your method of reaching out to me.”

She’d figured as much, but it would have seemed—it had been worth a shot.

(It is. Very difficult, trying to deal with a person who may or may not be reading her mind.)

“Right. So how can I be assured you won’t just reach into my brain and trauma-scramble me the way Martin says you can,” Sasha says.

“I suppose you’ll just have to trust me. If you’re going to be my new Archivist, Sasha, trust is an important thing.”

“So’s common sense. You want someone who’s going to survive their encounters, after all.”

There’s a puff of static, presumably some amused sound that Elias made. Okay, so maybe common sense _isn’t_ the most important criterion for an Archivist, or at least hasn’t been before. But that was also in a time where his Archivist didn’t know what was going on. 

“You know you can’t use Jon anymore,” Sasha says. “Martin saw to that. He’s too afraid of what he might become, and not the sort of fear you want. What you _want_ is someone willing to get involved, if nothing else.”

“Is it?”

“Need I remind you that _you_ are the one who first contacted _me_ with those statements. Do we really need to be coy about this now? No, you don’t need me, and you could strap Jon in and force-feed him fear if you really wanted to, but you’re not really the sort to get your hands dirty, are you? Why bother, if I’m right here and willing?”

“Face to face, Sasha. That’s my requirement.”

Yeah. She’d figured that might be the case. Just because she’d prepared for the thought doesn’t mean she’s too pleased about it, mind, but—

“Very well. In the tunnels.”

“Ah, yes, you’ve made yourselves quite comfortable there, haven’t you?”

He doesn’t know, can’t know for sure—except of course Sasha is thinking about it now. The little nook they have with all the sleeping bags and their things, so if he was unsure before it’s good to assume he isn’t now. 

“More importantly, powers don’t work as well down there. A gesture of good faith, Elias, how about it?”

“If it will satisfy you that I won’t...what did you call it, trauma-scramble you?” His amusement grates. Like she’s an unreasonable child he’s humoring. “Really, I can’t think what sort of circumstances my, ah...Other Self might have been facing, but I assume they must have been dire to resort to such extreme measures. Still. If that’s what you need then I accept. Will that be all?“

And despite the fact she had been gunning for this, actually _getting_ it, having him agree so easily, leaves her without words for a good few moments. 

There’s an angle here, there has to be an angle, a way for him to exploit this, or he wouldn’t be agreeing so readily. Right? Something she’s missing. Maybe Leitner was wrong and Elias’ powers work just fine in the tunnels. Maybe—

No. No, she isn’t going down this path, she isn’t going to turn into Jon. Elias needs her. He’s agreeing because he has no choice, or at least none so convenient as a candidate for Archivist just offering herself up.

“That’ll be all,” Sasha says. “I’ll get the others out of the way and let you know when.”

“Mm, very well. You now have my personal number, so no need to slip any more papers under my door. Quaint as that was.”

“I thought you’d appreciate your real name kept out of official emails.”

Elias chuckles. “Be that as it may. I await your call.”

And hangs up, because he always has to have the last word, she’s sure. It’s good, though, it’s fine, because she’s finally getting somewhere and that’s the important thing. 

She tucks her phone away and turns to head back down into the Archives, thinking only: she’s saving them all, she’s going to save them, everything will be fine.

(It is, as it turns out, very hard to consciously try to think of just the one thing. What does mind-reading mean? Does he hear the words as she thinks them, is it more imagery and impressions, does he get the whole mess dumped into his brain, or does he simply Know the gist of it? Focus. _Focus_. She’s working to save everyone.)

As soon as she’s closed the trap door behind her, Sasha lets out an emphatic, “Fuck,” and just breathes, leaning her forehead against the cool concrete wall.

*

Having lost Melanie, and with Tim being unreasonable, Sasha’s only option for back-up is Leitner. Which, frankly, is probably best. She was planning on borrowing, possibly nicking, the Seven Lamps of Architecture, so this keeps her operation tight. The fewer people she needs to worry about, the better. 

Finding Leitner is the easy bit. Convincing him to be of use instead of cowering in a corner somewhere proves rather more difficult, but a combination of her charming company, promises of continued comforts like hot meals and said company, and not a small number of veiled threats do the trick. Along with the promise of revenge on Elias for Gertrude, of course.

“But I’d best only give you the book when it’s time,” Leitner says, a hand curled over its spine protectively. 

“No, you’ll give it to me now. Call it insurance against cold feet.”

He has the gall to look offended. “You really think I would simply abandon you?”

“Mr. Leitner, you have, by your own admission, just stood by and watched people die before,” Sasha says. “You left Gertrude’s body to rot in that room for _years_ , and you called her a friend. So you’ll forgive me if I don’t have the most confidence in the likelihood you’d show up to help me, a person you barely know, without incentive.”

“You’ve already provided ample incentive.”

“The food, the company, you’ve managed so far without them. Revenge, you could’ve taken yourself by now. And if you get cold feet at the last minute, you probably trust you can just hide from me and avoid repercussions.”

“I’ve given my word, Ms. James.”

To that, Sasha just stares him down silently, her hand out. He nods in a, _yes okay good point_ , as to how much weight his word might have here. And after several long, silent moments—did she push too far? Is he going to rescind his help entirely? Will she have to resort to more drastic measures after all?—he reluctantly hands her the Seven Lamps of Architecture. 

“You remind me of Gertrude, you know,” he says, petulant. “She had much of the same way about her.”

“Good,” Sasha says, and flips open the book. “Now show me which passages I’ll need to read.”

*

Admittedly, Sasha procrastinates on this next bit. 

She sets up the cameras Melanie got her in front of the trap door, texts Melanie again to apologise, practices pulling the book in and out of her jacket pocket a few times to make sure she can do it without fumbling—and also marvels at the sort of pockets men’s jackets have that they can fit a whole goddamn book without much trouble. Luckily she’d gotten into the habit of stealing Tim’s and then buying her own, rolling up the sleeves for that oversized chic, so it shouldn’t be too suspicious when Elias sees her in this. 

But eventually, between her hunger and the passing time, Sasha has to shore up her patience and swallow her pride and, damn it all, go find the rest.

Their section of the tunnels smells of tea and damp with an undercurrent of stale crisps. Surprisingly, they aren’t there. It’s tempting to just grab a bag of crisps and another cereal bar and disappear a while longer, but this is an important part of the plan too. She’s an adult. She can do this.

She does swipe a cereal bar, though, and eats it in several too-big bites as she heads out in search of them. When she gets close enough to the tape room that she can hear Gertrude’s voice, she knows she’s on the right track. One last moment to steel herself. Deep breaths. She can _do this_.

Sasha makes no effort to be quiet or stealthy as she approaches, which means the three of them are already looking at the doorway when she enters. Tim and Martin, who had been bent together over a pile of papers and the tape recorder, straighten up. Jon, stood by the shelves with a notebook, curls in on himself and pretends to be focusing very intently on one of the boxes on the shelf. 

Tim clicks the tape recorder off and raises an eyebrow. Well? He’s waiting.

She and Martin start speaking at the same time, a, “Look, I’m—” overlapping with, “We’re glad you’re—” and they both stop, Martin with a small smile. He gestures for her to go ahead.

“I’m only trying to protect us,” Sasha says. Not what she’d meant to start with, but. “You know that, right?” 

Martin puts a hand on Tim’s arm to stop him from answering. He says, infinitely, _irritatingly_ gentle, “Yeah. We know. But you don’t have to? Or at least, not on your own. And...I mean, you could tell us.”

She wants very badly to snap _could I?_ because being lectured on what she should and shouldn’t have done by an imposter rankles.

Tell them _what_? Hey, Martin, I’d like to test the boundaries of your Lonely powers to see if they can be used against us or if, in fact, they’re any use at all? Hey, Jon, you gonna use those eldritch eye powers, because I will if you won’t. Hey, Tim, stand with _me_ , your best everything, against a doppelganger from another dimension and the guy who fucked everything up in another world, I’ll do it right but you have to trust me. 

Because that would have gone great. 

(It hadn’t occurred to her that Tim _wouldn’t_.)

But it doesn’t matter. As galling as it is to be standing here in the doorway, the odd one out, it doesn’t matter. It’s given her the space she needs to act without them weighing her down. She wouldn’t be back if not for the fact she needs to make sure they stay out of the way, and she can’t do that if she doesn’t know what they’re up to. 

Sasha takes a deep breath. 

“You’re right,” she says, although they aren’t. And, “I’m sorry,” although she isn’t. Then to drive it home she adds, “I was just scared, and—I needed to _do_ something, and...I hurt you. I didn’t mean to but that doesn’t matter, because I did it anyway. And you’re right. We’re stronger together, so...so we should stay together.”

Martin smiles brightly, easy as that, and claps a hand on Tim’s back. Tim, in turn, slowly relaxes from his defensive rigidity, and Sasha feels like she’s at least earned the right to step into the room now.

“Made you coffee,” Tim says. He nods to where, in the corner with the rest of their stuff, her travel mug waits. “Dunno if it’s any good now—s’been a bit.”

“I’m sure it’s perfect, Tim.”

She detours there to grab her travel mug, heavy with coffee that she’s sure will be just the way she likes it, even if lukewarm at this point, before angling to join Tim and Martin. She sits cross-legged on the floor beside them, Martin shifting back a little to give her room. He feels bad, probably, for telling Tim. Good to know.

And then Jon says, “You told Melanie it was a joke. You told _me_ it was just a dream. That you’d—that I wasn’t…”

Tim grimaces, but says nothing. He and Martin both watch her. A final judgment call, looks like.

Sasha opens the latch of her travel mug and takes a cautious sip. As she’d thought: lukewarm but perfect. Looking down at the mug between her hands, she says, voice soft, “You were already so scared, Jon. If I’d told you—”

“I wouldn’t have been useful. I get it.”

Her head whips up. “No, that’s—!” Well. It’s part of it. But not all of it, and this much she can say with honesty, “There’s nothing you can do about the dreams. Telling you felt like...it felt like it’d be doing more harm than good. I didn’t want you beating yourself up even more.”

“So you decided to take that decision out of my hands. To lie to me.”

“What decision, Jon? You already knew to avoid live statements and, short of just not sleeping entirely, you can hardly decide to stop dreaming.”

“I could have tried! Tried...sleeping in the morning instead, or—”

“Or not at all? See, this is what I meant. You didn’t need another—”

Jon slams his notebook down on the nearest shelf with a clang. “You do _not_ get to decide what I need!” 

In the startled silence after, his mouth twists into something like regret. Jon is not a man who raises his voice, usually, and doesn’t look as though he likes having done it now. He continues, in a voice so tense and even it’s almost worse, “I have...the right to know what it is I’m perpetrating. Even unwillingly. I would have thought you’d understand that considering the mess we’re in, but apparently not, so I’ll break it down further. I am an adult, and would appreciate being treated like one. That is all I’ll say on the matter.”

Is he...did he really compare her keeping this from him to _Jonah Magnus_ signing them all up to eldritch service? _Really_? It’s an effort to keep the incredulity from her expression. Those are entirely different things, and if Sasha is leaning into the Eye it’s only so they actually have a fighting chance. And, yes, life would be a lot easier if Jon did too, but if she were really on Elias’ level she’d have forced that by now, wouldn’t she? But she hasn’t, and she won’t, and she’s going to keep all of these arguments to herself because there’s no point.

“You’re right, Jon. I’m sorry. I guess I got carried away with worrying and planning, but that was wrong of me.”

Jon glances at her briefly then away again, half-turning. He gives no response.

She catches sight of Martin’s hand flexing towards Jon, as though Martin could have reached him all the way across the room, before he lets it rest against his leg. He looks from Tim to Sasha and back again, something wordless passing between them, and Tim gives the smallest shake of his head. She doesn’t know what it means, but she doesn’t like it. How is _she_ the one on the outside?

“We’ve, um...we’ve been going through the tapes,” Martin says. An olive branch, or maybe just a way to break the expectant space, but she’ll take it either way.

They quickly bring Sasha up to speed on what they’ve been doing today, primarily figuring out Gertrude’s organisation. Or, well, Martin brings her up to speed, with Tim contributing a word here and there. Jon remains quiet, for the most part, cross-referencing events, names, and dates from the tapes Martin had brought with the ones on the shelves, and gives only brief responses when addressed.

They’ve figured out that the tapes on the left and front were all organised by entity, but where those were more general encounters, the ones on the right hand side were more directly involved with rituals or and internal power-grabs, and those were organised chronologically. It helped to have Martin there to recognise the names, of course, but apparently when Gertrude _wasn’t_ trying to actively sabotage attempts to make sense of things, it was much easier.

“What can I do?” Sasha asks. “What are you two listening to right now?”

“Oh, er. It’s a relisten actually. Number...” Martin flips the cassette case. “0110307. Spiral one. Spiral here’s different so that’s where there’s been the most discrepancy.”

“Seems to be the earliest manifestation of your friend Gerry,” Tim says. “Least as far as we can figure.”

“ _Except_ , based on other recordings, Keay was still working with Gertrude as of 2014,” Martin says. 

Sasha takes a moment to digest this. She has some theories on what might be behind it, but it’s clear they’re building up to a reveal, so best to let them have it. “So..then how was he still working with her? Case 0110307 means...it was in 2011, right?”

“Right, but listen to this.” 

Tim presses play with a flourish, and Gertrude resumes her tale of a statement giver who discovered an incredibly confused goth wandering his home, having emerged from a door that had never been there before with a map in hand that made no sense. Keay returned several times over the span of three years, sometimes angry, sometimes catatonic, sometimes aware of where he was and others just full of confused questions. His final lucidity as he warned the statement giver to run is...heartbreaking, in a way, although Gertrude’s post-script about the statement giver’s entirely expected disappearance soon after _does_ temper that. 

“This being the Spiral I am, admittedly, inclined to doubt Mr. Chatham’s perception of time. Certainly he _believes_ he remembers when it all began, but...” Gertrude trails off. “This requires further research.”

It ends there. Sasha looks between Tim and Martin.

“And? I’m guessing if you’re relistening to this, it’s because you’ve got something.”

Tim nods. “ _And_ we went back to some other Keay sightings, plus more Spiral statements. Even in ones where he wasn’t explicitly there as the Distortion, there’s been some Spirally elements to his appearances from 2011 onward. Odd proportions or perception issues or—”

“Which could just be the Spiral messing with what they experience,” Sasha says. 

“Right, _but!_ ”

And then Tim gestures to Martin, who gets that small smile, that inward look, which tells her before he even says anything that he’s going to talk about his Jon. 

“When he...When I came here,” Martin says. “I didn’t understand it entirely, he had a tendency to just jump fifteen steps ahead, what with that whole...all-knowing thing—but he, he said something about the Spiral and the power of doorways, even if he was making one himself. And I’ve been in the Distortion’s hallways before, me and...well. Time’s weird in there. We wandered for what felt like _ages_ , but when we came out it had barely been any time at all.”

Sasha listens with a polite blankness, because she’s been told it comes across as condescending when her face does the skepticism thing. But frankly, none of this sounds like it will help them with Elias. It would be nice if they could trap him in the Distortion hallways for a bit, but no guarantee when it might spit him out the other side. Assuming it even _could_. 

But maybe there’s an angle she’s not seeing, so Sasha asks, “Okay. And what’s the endgame here? Are we trying to go back? To...stop Elias? Or maybe before Martin got…?”

Martin grimaces, apologetic. “I’m...not sure that’s possible. Or - or if it is, not by any of...Jon, _my_ Jon, could only use it because he was the Archivist in, y’know, a world where the Eye reigned over all or whatever. What I mean is...if he used the Distortion to send me here, then the Distortion is probably my best bet to go _back_.”

“...Oh.”

It hadn’t occurred to her that Martin would be actively searching for a way back. It should have. She knows he has that whole burning romance thing. But considering he had left an actual literal apocalypse, and considering they’re trying to prevent their own apocalypse from manifesting, why _should it_? In fact, why is this what they’re expending their energy on right now? Can’t they open a portal to the apocalypse after they’ve fixed things here?

Once again, Sasha remains the only person with her eyes on what’s actually important, but...no, this is good. Them having a research project is great, in fact.

“Well,” she says, “I guess the next step is...figuring how to harness the Distortion?”

Tim nudges her side, and when she glances over he’s giving her a flat look, lips pursed. It takes her a good few seconds to parse what he’s doing the disappointed face about, and then a few seconds longer to decide oh, he is, in fact, being serious. 

“Oh, right, yes. No harnessing people’s powers.”

It’s on the tip of her tongue to say the Distortion isn’t _people_ and therefore shouldn’t count. But Jon, behind them, has been stock-still this whole time, his head tilted in that way that says he’s paying more attention than he’d like them to think. 

He’ll assume she’s talking about him, bless.

“Sorry. I misspoke. I just mean...convince him to help? Maybe?”

“It’s a start,” Tim murmurs to her, while Martin launches into talking about the somewhat friendly, in a sort of predatory way, Distortion he knew, and how she helped the team in his dimension by, once, giving Jon a way out of being kidnapped, and at another time held Jared Hopworth when he attacked.

Jon scribbles something down and moves on to another part of the shelf, still silent.

*

Melanie King waits.

Naomi Hearne as well, of course, and Lionel Elliott, he’s sure he’ll see them too, but _Melanie_ … The other two relive their horrors and call to him, soundless, hopeless, knowing not to expect help from a fixture of their hellscape but reaching anyway because that’s all they can do. Melanie, however, does not reach. Melanie knows it’s him, and he’s real, and he’s there, and her anger is a visceral thing. 

Jon cannot look away any more than Melanie can stop from creeping closer to the Thing in the hospital. But she meets his eyes as she does, unblinking, and her snarl says, _Well? Have your fill_. 

It’s only a cold bolt of pain through his cheekbone that jolts him out of the hospital. Jon wakes and shoots his arms out quickly to stabilise himself and the shelf he had fallen face-first into. He manages both, but barely, and several tapes do still manage to fall. Their clattering makes him wince, both for the way the sound seems to carry and the alarmed, “Jon!” that follows, now that he’s gone and alerted literally everyone.

To the rushing footsteps, he says, “It’s fine!”

He is not fine. Speaking makes his face throb, pain spiderwebbing from his cheek to his jaw and forehead, and his brain still has that heaviness of half-sleep that means his thoughts feel like they’re wading through treacle. Also, his glasses are a little askew, but that much he can fix, at least, as he draws himself straighter and insists, “It’s fine, I tripped. No lasting damage except to my pride.” 

“Tripped _my arse_ ,” Tim says, crossing the room in several unfairly long strides. He holds Jon’s chin between his thumb and forefinger and tilts his face up, but when Jon swats him away he at least lets go and doesn’t try again. “You nodded off again, didn’t you?”

Martin, from the doorway, sighs. “ _Again_? This has happened before? Jon, you should really switch to decaf. You need a _proper_ night’s rest, you can’t keep on like this.”

 _Keep on_ , like it’s been any more than just three days of his attempts. And considering he _did_ sleep a little on that first one, just earlier in the day, he hardly thinks it should count.

“I think those nights are long behind me, Martin,” Jon says. “It’s hardly as though I get a decent night’s sleep when I do sleep. If I’m going to be sleep-deprived anyway, I might as well not haunt people.”

A thought manages to stagger its way out of the treacle as he looks from Tim, beside him, to Martin out there, and registers someone missing.

“Where’s Sasha? Did she—”

“Here!” Sasha yells from outside. She appears behind Martin a moment later, arms folded. “Not gone off for some nefarious plots or anything, promise. Just didn’t think you’d appreciate someone else crowding you.” 

She smiles. Jon blinks.

“Yes, well.” 

He feels foolish but can’t find it in himself to apologize. Nor does he protest, however, when Martin tells her Jon was just worried, and how it doesn’t hurt to make sure everyone’s safe. Jon isn’t sure what he’d thought, beyond the initial jolt of _keep an eye on Sasha,_ but he isn’t going to make things any more tense than they already are.

“Anyway, I’m sorry to have pulled you away. I’ll just finish, ah…” Frankly, he isn’t sure what he’d been doing either, but he can see his notebook on the floor nearby and that seems a good place to start.

Tim grabs the notebook before he can. “How about we take a break first? Get some food in you.”

“I’m guessing that’s not really a suggestion and you’ll hold my notebook hostage until I agree,” Jon says.

“Nah.” Tim holds it out and does not, as Jon half-expected, snatch it back again when Jon goes to take it. “If you don’t want to, that’s fine. But you really do look like you need it, Boss.”

Food doesn’t really appeal. Just the prospect of needing to chew through another lacklustre meal is exhausting, and he’s tired of eating out of a packet, let alone doing so while his face hurts and his skin prickles. Part of him suspects this may be more of his burgeoning “spooky” powers, a hunger only statements can fill, so on and so forth. The rest of him acknowledges he’s always been picky about this sort of thing. 

Still, if he doesn’t sit down and show them he’s fine they’re just going to fuss more later. And he does have one or two cans of coffee stashed in his bag that he might be able to sneak when he goes for a smoke after. Vile, yes. Jon isn’t a fan of coffee as it is, usually, let alone when it doesn’t even have the benefit of holding something warm and he can’t hide the taste under copious additives. But, vile as it is, it does the trick when the Institute is up and about and a kettle is out of the question. 

“Fine...fine.”

And nevermind Tim’s pleased smile, Martin just lights up, his entire posture and expression lifting in a way that...that...Jon’s not entirely sure how to feel about. 

He decides not to think about it. They settle on their sleeping bags, distribute food, and crunch their way through idle chatter about their research, discontinued crisp flavours, and how Jon isn’t the only one craving an actual decent meal.

“Sure would be useful if our favourite horrible book-collector were around to open up a door to the surface for us,” Tim says loudly. He pauses, listening, but there is nothing in return. No approaching footsteps or response whatsoever.

Of course there isn’t. Now that Jon actually wants to see the old sod, of course he’d stay away. 

“There _are_ supposedly more actual exits,” Sasha says, considering. “We should try to find them again. Should be easier from the inside than the outside.”

“Yes, because that went so well for my counterpart,” says Jon. 

“Well, without Leitner shifting the walls on us randomly, it _should_ be easier.”

“That puts a great deal of faith in Leitner.”

Whatever Sasha wants to say at first, she clearly thinks better of it, and after a few tries just ends up saying, “I guess so.”

He should be pleased with how placating she’s been since her return, always careful around him and avoiding certain contentious topics—like, say, Leitner—but instead something itches at him. It could be lingering irritation from having missed _so much_ of what was going on, but now that he does know, that he does see, it could also be that he can sense there’s something she’s not saying.

“Maybe he’s just shy,” Martin pipes up. And it’s so absurd that all of them shift to look at him and that lopsided, self-conscious smile of his, but he goes on regardless, “He’s been, how long without really talking to people? Maybe he’s worried about, yknow, being too overbearing. Or—I mean, four people at once after years without conversation would be a lot. He might just be...introvert recharging somewhere.” 

Jon mutters, “Or realised we might depend on him for help and didn’t want to risk his neck.”

Despite his interjection, Martin soon gets the ball rolling on them considering sending Leitner food to butter him up or going for a one-on-one talk. They’re not entirely sure where he likes to keep himself, but if they’re going to map the tunnels anyway they’ll probably come across him, and it’s probably somewhere close to where Melanie left him meals and notes in the first place since he found them.

They do not mention Melanie by name, however, pushed by Martin’s insistent cheer into the semblance of a normal conversation.

Considering he was the first to be subjected to Sasha’s brand of meddling, to put it lightly, one would think Martin would be more reticent to go back to them being a big happy friend group—

Although one could argue about the happy. And the friend group. Frankly even big is subject to interpretation.

—and yet he keeps doing this. Ever since Sasha came back, he’s softened Tim’s reprimands, taken over the awkward silences, just gently and enthusiastically steered conversations into less fraught territories. 

Jon understands it, on some level. Martin’s Sasha had her life stolen and so on, and perhaps he even feels responsible for driving a wedge between Tim and Sasha. It may have been entirely warranted, certainly, but guilt isn’t logical. On his better days, rare as they are, Jon is intimately aware of this.

But, still, _still_ , he can’t shake the feeling there’s something else at play here too.

Other Jon, Monstrous Jon, began his descent with paranoia. Jon decided he wouldn’t be that, he would trust them, and as a result he’s consistently failed to see the signs all around him and here he is, still manifesting tapes, tasting horrible truths, and dreaming of hellscapes.

Except, who told them that was Other Jon’s first failing? Martin. Martin said that, supplemented with tapes that might have suggested Other Jon was being absurd but who knows what happened in between the tapes, or what Other Jon wasn’t committing to them. There’s no way of knowing the complete picture.

There’s only one way he can think of to be absolutely certain they’re telling the truth, so close he can feel the fizzle of power on his tongue. If he isn’t careful, it’s easy to let that power slip into his words, turn into a question that demands an answer. He wants to let it, he _wants_ to ask them. 

But if he does, and he’s wrong…

(But if he doesn’t, if he isn’t, if he just sits on his hands and the world comes crashing around his ears _again_ …)

These are times he understands Sasha.

But Melanie King waits behind the heaviness of his eyelids, snarl at the ready, so he holds his tongue for now and instead listens to their gentle bickering as they pretend everything is fine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welp, this one took me a hot second to finish, but after several false starts, three different versions of the phonecall scene, 11k words trimmed back to 8kish, here we finally are! I hope you've enjoyed the ride, and I'll see you soon for the next two (yes, two, you might have noticed the chapter number updated) chapters. 
> 
> All the thanks to rustkid for helping me trim down this behemoth. <3


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